Balaji's Thots

Director Vijay Milton started off strong with Goli Soda, where he showed us that a strong script and interesting characters can easily overcome a movie’s lack of star power to create a rousing experience. But he forgot all that as the lure of a big star vehicle and a big budget led him to make […]

Ennodu Vilaiyadu has the very unique backdrop of horse racing. The sport has a reputation of being addictive and destroying families as huge amounts of money are gambled away on the races but the film doesn’t deal with that aspect of it except for a couple of warning lines at the end. Instead it uses […]

     Tamil cinema is pretty unforgiving when it comes to giving second chances to our heroes. There have been many actors who have bounced back after after almost being written off after a string of flops but they typically had a strong fan base that never lost faith in them and so they never really […]

Among the sub-genres in horror, my least favorite is the zombie movie. Most of these zombie movies end up looking the same since the story line cannot deviate much from zombies chasing humans and attacking them to create more zombies. The Korean film Train to Busan also does this but does a few other things as well to […]

Yaakkai begins with a well-filmed scene where a car is pushed down from the rooftop of a Chennai hospital at night. When ACP Sahayam(Prakashraj) arrives at the scene the next day, we learn that the chief of the hospital Krishnamoorthy(Radharavi) was killed and then placed in the car before its fall. This sets the stage for […]

Mupparimaanam doesn’t inspire much confidence in the beginning. Kathir(Shanthanu) gets a typical mass hero introduction scene where he swats away a bunch of goons at a marriage hall and then kidnaps the bride Anusha(Shrushti Dange). The fight sequence is good even if completely one-sided but the subsequent chase is rather generic and doesn’t generate much by […]

The success of the last 2 Kanchana movies made Raghava Lawrence a star with box-office clout. While they were commercial successes, our heroes have always treated successful mass masala movies as the holy grail of stardom. Lawrence’s attempt at that stardom gives us Motta Shiva Ketta Shiva, a hardcore, B-grade mass masala movie. Lawrence is more acceptable […]

Arivazhagan is a director who hasn’t hit the big league even after providing two good entertainers(Eeram, Vallinam) in two very different genres(horror, sports drama). Arun Vijay too has languished for years in the lower ranks of Tamil cinema without getting the all-important break that would enable him to climb up the rungs of stardom. The two […]

I was pretty excited when Rum was advertised as a “heist-horror thriller” since those are two of my favorite genres and Tamil cinema has recently delivered some good films(Pizza, Maya, Rajathanthiram, etc.) in both those genres. But that advertisement is quite misleading. Rum is pretty much a horror film with the heist portion serving only as […]

Producer C.V.Kumar has built up a reputation for bankrolling small but interesting films in a variety of genres ranging from sci-fi(Indru Netru Naalai) to horror(Pizza). Like many of the films that he has produced, Adhe Kangal too features actors who are not household names(yet) and a new director. And like those other films, this film, a thriller, […]