Category: Film Reviews
-
Nobody’s Epic
The first thing to report about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is that it commits the one sin Homer never managed: it feels short. Nearly three hours pass like a fair wind, and I never once wondered how many were left. Time, Nolan’s oldest obsession, is here his only remaining magic trick, and he needs it, because…
-
The Coldest Spielberg
I made a pact with myself (a post from 22 years ago) in a dark living room a long time ago, right around the time the bicycle in E.T. left the ground. Any film Spielberg makes, I watch it first day. With Jurassic Park I renewed the pact and Schindler’s List made it permanent. I…
-
Nayakan – The first masterpiece
This essay is part of the Pesum Padam – Mani Ratnam Retrospective Series and revisits Nayakan. Watch the retrospective tomorrow on youtube. My maternal grandfather, was the most righteous man I knew. He saw the world in clean lines. You were either good or you were not. Yet for all his black-and-white convictions, there was one name he spoke…
-
Thalapathi: A Brother in the Dark
This essay is part of the Pesum Padam – Mani Ratnam Retrospective Series and revisits Thalapathi. Watch the retrospective on youtube. Shakespeare wrote three great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. The last of these, a bleak study on age, inheritance, and madness, was reimagined by Akira Kurosawa into Ran, a Japanese war epic where…
-
Retro: A Genre-Spliced Krishna Trip
There’s a scene in Jigarthanda DoubleX that doesn’t just whisper Karthik Subbaraj’s philosophy; it flaunts it. Caesar, the gangster-turned-gun-slinging film junkie, watches a Clint Eastwood western in a crumbling theatre, transfixed. Then, as if summoned by Eastwood himself, he walks not beside the screen but through it, literally exiting via a door carved into the…
kirukkal.com 