Balaji's Thots

When the central plot point in a movie is a gag, a supremely silly event, the film requires a director with a confident, comic touch to construct the movie in such a way that the happening fits right in, flows smoothly by complementing the gags up to that point and lays a comic foundation for […]

Enakkul oruvan translates to ‘someone inside me’. In Kamal’s Enakkul Oruvan, a reincarnation film, that someone was the man protagonist lived as in his previous life. In this Enakkul Oruvan, a remake of Kannada film Lucia, that someone is a man the protagonist creates in his dreams. The protagonist is Vicky(Sidharth, with his face darkened), […]

Revenge thrillers have a rather rigid template. The protagonist undergoes a family-related tragedy caused by the bad guys and then goes after them with single-minded determination, extracting his revenge in crowd-pleasing ways. The tone may be dark(Naan Sigappu Manithan) or more masala-ish(Aboorva Sagodharargal) but the basic plot remains the same. But Sriram Raghavan, the director […]

Aambala Sundar. C’s strength has always been comedy. And that’s what his latest film Aambala looks to be initially. There’s straight comedy of course as Santhanam, who plays a cop RDX Rajasekhar, gets gradually demoted after repeatedly bungling up the capture of a terrorist. But everything else is also presented with comedy. So Saravanan’s(Vishal) romance […]

As I’ve mentioned many times before, the heist movie figures near the top of my list of favorite film genres. A well-made heist movie is capable of keeping us hooked with a good mix of smarts and suspense as the heist is planned and carried out. So its unfortunate that the genre is one of […]

Usually the plot of a book is its meat, the aspect of the book that draws us in and keeps us reading. But sometimes the idea that kicks off the plot is by itself so interesting, so delicious that we are hooked even before the story takes off. That happened in John Verdon’s Think of […]

For Sivakarthikeyan, every new movie seems to be a step towards jettisoning the ‘comedy hero’ tag and earning the coveted ‘action hero’ tag(a comparison of the careers of action heroes and comedy heroes in Tamil cinema makes the reasons behind his desire quite clear). Kaaki Sattai is the clearest example yet of his intentions to […]

Baby finds covert ops agent Ajay(Akshay Kumar) in a series of missions with hardly any breathing time between. The film’s innocuous name is actually the name of the unit he is a part of, an elite unit that is made up of a select few from different groups and as part of a 5-year test […]