Vishal Menon

Nahas Hidhayath, both writer and director of I’m Game, does something clever by setting his second film in Hyderabad. When looked at purely as a business proposition, it makes sense given the stardom Dulquer Salmaan enjoys in the two Telugu-speaking states. From a narrative lens, the Hyderabad setting complements the film’s larger-than-life aspirations and the audacity with which it navigates a particularly improbable plotline. But instead of settling for this alien setting alone, it adds Tamil characters to its core. The film doesn’t even make a big deal of this, choosing instead to play this lack of specificity as something very natural to the film’s urban setting. What these choices do is prepare us for a film that feels like it was not made in Malayalam. But there are advantages to this too. Instead of looking for realism or the crutch of logic to enter its crazy world, we’re already there about 10 minutes into the film. This creates a distance, as though this story is happening somewhere else, but it also sets the stage for the film to take a wild swing at almost anything, as long as it entertains.

There’s a forgotten brand of humour that works really well for the most part in Vishnu Edavan’s Hi. Reminding one of the loud, but likeable comedies from the ’90s made by directors like Ezhil and Sundar C, the intentional old-schoolness of Hi has a way of surprising you with its silliness. It doesn’t even attempt to play it safe or try the logical approach. If there’s a joke to be milked, the film will do anything, even if means hitting someone on the head with a pole. It’s desperate and immatur, but oftentimes also feels oddly sincere.

To call Once More an intense love story would be to reduce it to just one aspect that make this film wonderfully frustrating. Instead, I’d prefer to look at this story of a man named Raghuvaran (Arjun Das) as something of a cruel whodunnit. I call it that because the Raghu we first meet can barely be called a person who is well and alive. He’s a corpse, that’s just about capable of walking and talking. When we see him in constant conversation with both a priest as well as a psychiatrist, we see him grappling with spirituality and/or science to bring him alive. Instead of saying ‘Raghu is…’, the film trains you to say ‘Raghu was…’

Director Vysakh has made some of Malayalam cinema’s biggest blockbusters, but he still doesn’t have a clue about how to handle romance. In a fairly straightforward first half hour of the film, you’d expect to understand the Ali family’s hierarchy and criminal legacy; Vysakh forces a “cute” love story between Prithviraj Sukumaran’s Aamir Ali and a girl named Fiza. There’s some background here about Aamir’s ailing grandpa and how he wants to see him get married as his dying wish, but you can smell the fluff from miles away.

Set aside all temptations to speak about small town Angamaly as a character in Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, because even a guitar has a full character arc in Gireesh AD’s effortlessly charming film. The first scene of the film is Ashley (Mamitha Baiju) getting ready to say goodbye to her group of close friends as we hear chatter about her moving to a college in Ernakulam. They click selfies, hug each other all teary eyed and as a farewell gift, her friends gift her a new guitar. It takes an hour more, but it’s when we see the wallpaper on Ashley’s screen that we’re told about a band named Room 17 and of how she was its lead guitarist. When her new neighbour Justin (Nivin Pauly) identifies the band that features on this wallpaper, it immediately brings Ashley closer to Justin, someone she thinks off as the only person around her who’s even heard of that band.

Director Elan’s Pyaar Prema Kalyanam could be termed a spiritual sequel to his first film Pyaar Prema Kadhal, a detail the director will not allow you to forget. At the core of it, they’re both films about the chaos that erupts when the families of a couple, decide to force their opinions onto their children. Both of these films also try to analyse a fairly modern (or seemingly progressive) relationship status from a distance, banking on the comedy that erupts when their orthodox family members try to come to terms with it. Pyaar Prema Kadhal, which released in 2018, did this with a couple that decides to enter into a live-in relationship, that too when one of their families live just one street away from them. In Pyaar Prema Kalyanam, Elan takes it one step ahead; the couple here are sure about getting married, but the groom must leave behind his home to move in with the bride and her family.

What you’re likely to feel about Venky Atluri and Suriya’s Vishwanath & Sons will largely depend on how you feel about Mamitha Baiju’s performance in it. She plays Maddy, a surrogate mother who enters the life of Vishwanath’s titular son when he’s emotionally blackmailed into finding an heir to his $5.4 billion fortune. Atluri could have used several descriptors to explain Maddy’s character to Mamitha Baiju, but there’s no denying the hangover of a thousand loosu ponnus of Tamil cinema who had to walk, just so Mamitha could run.

40 minutes into the three-hour-long Magudam, you feel like there’s almost nothing you’ve been told that matters to the larger plot. You’re introduced to a medical representative named Kripa and his family, and told repeatedly about their middle-class desire to buy a car. It’s info the film could have conveyed with one succinctly written dialogue, but Magudam hammers this point into our heads with sentimental scenes, a cringy family song about this dream and the most gnawingly dated comedy scenes led by Thambi Ramiah. It becomes clear as day that this car is going to be important to the plot, but given the amount of time it takes to keep droning on about it, you begin to expect a twist so original that you imagine M Night Shyamalan shifting base to Saligramam to live closer to Vishal.