Balaji's Thots

While most thrillers attempt to keep us in suspense about the plot and some of the characters, U-Turn keeps us guessing about the genre it belongs to for quite some time. It starts off looking like a socially conscious, investigative thriller as Rachana(Shraddha Srinath), an intern at Indian Express, collects evidence about drivers making illegal, […]

A cruise ship is a unique place to set a missing person story and that’s the setting for Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10. Lo, a journalist for a travel magazine, gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cover the maiden voyage of an ultra-luxurious cruise ship Aurora. Lo meets the titular woman in the adjacent cabin […]

During the year, I listen to songs from individual albums and one of my activities in the new year is to create a playlist of all my favorite songs from the films that released the previous year. I’ve been doing this for a few years now and with my ‘2016 Favorites’ playlist ready, I thought I’d […]

As a director, Parthiban has usually displayed a willingness to experiment, to deliver stories that were different from the usual. He went all out  by wading deep into the ‘meta’ aspects of cinema in his last film Kathai Thiraikkathai Vasanam Iyakkam. He reins himself in and delivers a more straightforward story, only occasionally resorting to gimmicks, in […]

If Suraa‘s colossal failure put Vijay on a comeback route that saw him appear in somewhat different films like Kaavalan, Nanban,  Thuppaakki and Puli, Theri made me wonder if Puli‘s failure had made him jump back on the masala bandwagon. That doubt has been confirmed with his latest film Bairavaa, a film that fits the ‘standard Vijay […]

I usually stick to mass masala films with stars like Mahesh Babu, Pawan Kalyan and Jr. NTR when I watch the occasional Telugu film. But Kshanam stars mostly new – or at least unfamiliar to me – faces and has a new director at the helm also. A thriller, it starts off with a carjacking […]

To the outside world Grace has the perfect marriage – a handsome and successful lawyer for a husband, a beautiful home and frequent trips to exotic Thailand. This debut novel by B.A.Paris is set in England and begins with a dinner party hosted by Grace and her husband Jack Angel for a few of their […]

One of the main reasons Malayalam cinema produces the best thrillers is that the movies have a single-minded focus on the subject without needless distractions like comedy, songs and romance. Oppam, from the successful Mohanlal-Priyadarshan duo, fails to have this focus. Its core story provides the needed thrills and Mohanlal delivers another effortlessly nuanced performance […]

As a sports movie, the broad outline of Dangal is quite formulaic. We have a coach who initially alienates his students with his tough coaching methods but they eventually come around and his training methods help them be victorious. But small changes in the screenplay and uniformly solid performances across the board hide the formulaic […]

The end of a year is traditionally the time for some introspection. So let me start with that as we say goodbye to 2016… While I haven’t done an actual count, I’m pretty sure that 2016 will be the year in which I wrote the least number of reviews since I started penning reviews in 1999. […]