Times were when Superman, Spider-Man and He-Man caught the imagination of Tamil filmgoers. The superheroes used to entertain and excite the audiences with their exotic looks and heroism, taking on the baddies with extra-terrestrial might. Film audiences here longed to see such films in their...
It’s a given that actors typecast as judges, doctors and policemen in Tamil films do not carry much weight and disappear with passage of time. Yet Sarath Babu, who has passed away at 71, was an actor who left his imprint on the role, significant or not. Such actors never change appearance on...
It takes a combination of a director, technicians, actors, theme of the story and the politics it speaks about to attract the audience in droves to the theatres. When Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan 1 was released, the major draw was the curiosity to know how he had visualised Kalki’s iconic...
It is customary for a historical film to take the audience across the centuries back to the period concerned with the magnificence of its visuals and the background music appropriately capturing the spirit of the period. In that respect, Ponniyin Selvan-1 passed muster thanks to the crew’s hard...
It takes the right mixture of entertaining features such as interesting narrative, peppy song-and-dance numbers etc for a commercial film to be a blockbuster. But what we are, of late, being passed off with are those made with old and rusty ideas. The latest film joining the run-of-the-mill...
Viduthalai part 1 directed by Vetrimaran speaks about the common people’s political understanding. The question of whether it is worth understanding by everyone spurs us on to the theatres where the film is being screened. The storyline of Viduthalai goes as follows: (Spoiler Alert) A railway...
There’s no guarantee that a film remade from another language will achieve the same success rate as the original. Mufti, the Kannada film might have gone down well with its target audience despite its inherent flaws, owing to its ensemble cast that’s appealing to the fans in the language or...
Converting reports from newspapers, unofficially shared information and gossip into fiction is something that the audience seems receptive to. At the same time, our society does not allow a thorough and faithful reconstruction of biographies of some famous people. Striking a balance between...
Some film songs that were once irresistibly spellbinding get edged out of public memory with the passage of time. But when composers of those songs or their latest works get recognition anew, those old numbers gush back into memory — like in the case of M M Keeravani. In the wake of the song...
A typical ‘kuthu’ dance-and-song number, peppy and spicy, from an Indian film has won global recognition for the first time. The wildly popular song Naatu Naatu from the superhit Telugu film RRR made history at the 80th Golden Globes as it became the first Indian song to win Best Original Song....
