Vishal Menon

One is unsure if it’s even ethical to call Good Bad Ugly a feature film. From a safe distance, one can argue that it’s the length of a regular movie and it also features a major movie star in the lead. If you want to push it, one may even argue that it has a something resembling a plot and a screenplay that holds characters and plot points in place. But if you’re willing to wake up and accept reality, you’ll soon realise that Good Bad Ugly is just the Instagram Reels homepage of Ajith’s most obsessive fanboy. Directed by Adhik Ravichandran, the film doesn’t even try to worry about delicately breaking the fourth wall; this Ajith fanboy ends up shooting so many references from the star’s filmography at us, that he nukes the fourth wall and builds a grand tomb over it.

One could be half an hour into the setup of Sashikanth’s Test and still be unsure of the genre of the film. When seen from the point of view of 34-year-old Kumudha (Nayanthara), Test is arguably about the testing phase leading up to her last attempt at being a mother. As for Indian team cricketer Arjun (Siddharth), who struggles with his form in what could be his final test match, the movie could be a sports drama about regaining respect from oneself. Finally, when you lean closer into Sara (Madhavan), the out-of-luck MIT scientist just one step away from changing the world, you could even look at Test as a sci-fi film about hydro-fuels. Not that this mix of genres in Test isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The film spends so much time planting us within the conflicts of each of these characters that you feel like you’re being set up for the ebbs and flows of a juicy mini-series, wherein each character is as important as the last. It’s a film that could have gone anywhere with its complexities; however, instead of going deeper into any of them, Test chooses to settle on one central plot line as it approaches the halfway mark.

Ponman seems like a silly title for the film this turned out to be. The title translates to ‘kingfisher’, but it’s also a play on the phrase ‘pon’ meaning gold and man, because it’s about a man who deals in gold. By the end of the film, though, one might find other reasons to justify this title, but to begin with, you understand that it’s referring to the character played by Basil Joseph, a strange character named PP Ajesh. Going by the term the film uses, he runs what is called a “Madiyil Jewellery”, the kind of mobile jewellery in which the gold, literally, ends up on your lap. I’m not sure if this business is specific to Kollam, where the film is set in, but from my understanding of the trade, Ajesh is a broker who supplies gold to brides right before they get married, expecting to be repaid using the money they earn in the form of gifts during the wedding. It’s a peculiar practice, something many of us will discover as we watch Ponman. It is also ideal as a plot device in a film that talks about dowry, that too within the fascinating Latin Catholic community of the region. So, when we first meet PP Ajesh, he’s supplying 25 sovereigns of gold to a bride named Stefi Graf (Lijimol Jose), a night before she gets married to the “big, mountain-like” Mariyano (Sajin Gopu).

How much does a young boy have to go through to be allowed the freedom to have an emotional breakdown? When we first meet Mithya (Athish Shetty), what we see is his back turned towards us as he travels on a train from somewhere to somewhere else. We later learn that he’s not travelling out of choice. He’s being displaced from his home in Mumbai to Udipi in Southern Karnataka where he will live with his uncle, aunt and their two daughters. Like Mithya, the film about him too has its back turned towards us. It’s not a film that grants you the solace of having empathised with its broken protagonist. Instead, it reveals these broken pieces so sparsely that we feel as lost and helpless as he does.

The first 30 minutes of Kadhal Enbadhu Podhu Udamai (Love Is Common Property) is not an easy film to sit through. It’s frothy and hollow and you’d be surprised that you’re watching the work of writer-director Jayaprakash Radhakrishnan, known for intense psychological dramas such as Lens (2016) and Thalaikoothal (2023). It begins with Sam (Lijomol Jose) confessing to her mother (Rohini) that she’s in love and wants her to meet this person. With the flowery set-up you’d find in silly rom-coms, we get scene after painful scene of the mother, preparing to welcome her future son-in-law. We learn that they hail from the upper middle class, and we also learn that Sam’s parents separated years ago. The film uses this time to introduce us to a handful of characters, including Sam’s father (Vineeth), Sam’s bestie Ravi (Kalesh) and Deepa (Deepa Shankar), the cook who is more than family.

In Sreejith Babu’s debut Painkili, cringe isn’t the after-effect as much as it is the aesthetic the film aspires for. It is self-aware and loud and made by a director with such an original style that he hasn’t yet found ways to bring it under control. How else would you describe some of the wild ideas that are dime a dozen? Take the example of a character named Jaffer, one of the many “gundas” in the film. Not only does Jaffer introduce himself each time he runs into a friend, but he goes on to call everyone around him Jaffer too. It doesn’t make any sense and oftentimes ideas like these are so strange that we’re unsure if we’re expected to laugh or wince. But in the odd instance one of these wild swings begin to make sense, it’s next to impossible to stop laughing.

There are lovely additions Magizh Thirumeni makes to Breakdown (1997) to humanise what was otherwise a straightforward Hollywood action movie. This begins right with the way he re-interprets the title ‘Breakdown’. Not only does this mean that Magizh’s version begins way before Arjun’s (Ajith Kumar) car breaks down in the middle of nowhere as he travels with his wife to Tbilisi, but the title also alludes to the ‘breakdown’ they are experiencing in their marriage. It’s middle of the road in a sense, but the not the kind you’re thinking about. They’ve been together for 12 years and they’ve lost the magic that had once brought them together. In another awkward meet-cute that we’ve now come to expect from Magizh Thirumeni, we’re told that Arjun once sent “Happy Birthday” messages every day to Kayal (Trisha) for six consecutive months. But after 12 years, Arjun doesn’t even remember the date anymore, even when the world stays up to wish Kayal.