Balaji's Thots

Movies that have stories about undercover cops tend to be quite exciting. Their surreptitious moves to retrieve information and/or expose the bad guys, the threat of being exposed at any time and the dire consequences of that exposure result in a constant state of tension, which can leads to many suspenseful moments. The best example […]

I’ve always thought that the careers of Yuvan Shankar Raja and Harris Jayaraj followed trajectories that were quite similar. And the recent work from them has only reinforced my observations. Both the music directors saw their best years in the 2000s. Both of them had some wonderful soundtracks and I used to eagerly await their […]

Father-son pairs acting in a movie isn’t that rare. Sivaji and Prabhu have co-starred in many movies and more recently, Sathyaraj and Sibi have appeared in a few movies together. But 3 generations of actors sharing the screen in a movie is quite rare. Manam, which stars three generations of the Akkineni family – Nageswara […]

Most Tamil films featuring animals have been targeted at children with the animals indulging in playful and cute antics as they assist and help out humans. We’ve also had devotional movies where the animals possessed divine powers and performed miracles(remember Nagalingam, where a snake becomes a resident pediatrician as it takes care of a baby […]

Once they reach a certain stature in cinema, our heroes start to cut down on their films and act in only one film at a time. And the time taken for said film to be completed has been increasing over the years. So its quite exciting that Kamalhassan has 3 films in various stages of […]

Shankar has firmly established himself as Tamil cinema’s showman with several big-budget entertainers to his name. Whether an indictment of our education system,  idealistic stories about the eradication of corruption and black money or less ambitious stories about twins or music, his movies have always been slick masala films that have their share of romance, […]

Mysskin is one of the few Tamil cinema directors possessing a very distinct, easily recognizable style. The different take on familiar subjects, the moody filmmaking, the deliberate pacing, the unique and sometimes purposefully disorienting camera angles, the colorful, dramatic characters, the stylized violence – the presence of elements like these have made his films instantly […]

Love at first sight has been a staple of many romances, especially in Tamil cinema, where we’ve had many films where the hero falls hard for the heroine after a single look at her. But that first (c)rush is usually followed up by the girl and the boy meeting many times, one of them(usually the […]

2014 was a good year for Dhanush as he had a huge blockbuster in his only release Velaiyilla Pattadhari. His performance came in for a lot of well-deserved praise and the film helped him bounce back from a middling 2013 that saw him appear in the average Maryaan and the much-derided Naiyaandi. The last couple […]

After Aravaan, Vasanthabalan gives us another period film in Kaaviya Thalaivan though the time period here is much later. Kaaviya Thalaivan is set in pre-Indepence India, a time when Tamil drama was flourishing. The film takes a behind-the-screen look at the interplays between the members of one of the drama troupes of the time. The […]