It’s been a minute since a rom-com like Miss You was made in Tamil. It is not to say the film is rare or great, but it is just one of those old-school rom-coms that harps just on a straightforward story and drama. A kind that hasn’t been around for a while now. Directed by N Rajasekar, starring Siddharth and Ashika Ranganath in the lead roles, Miss You reminds you of the times when not every single release had to be unique or bearing a USP or having the need to cater to the whole nation. It has low stakes, featuring normal people, cliched songs, and fights that evoke a sense of nostalgia. The strong point of Miss You is that is aware of its limitations and contrivances. At one instance, when a character is forced to narrate the past, he lets out a disclaimer that the ‘flashback’ is going to feature a story within the story. That doesn’t absolve the film of its mistakes, but it is nice to know now and then that the filmmakers aren’t in a bubble.

Watching Soodhu Kavvum 2 makes one realise the genius of the first part and its director Nalan Kumarasamy. More than the delicious dark houmour and wacky texture, the life of Soodhu Kavvum (2013) lies in its sarcastic pessimism. Nalan doled out a cynical comedy about a corrupt society beyond reckoning. Yet, his dark comedy made everyone overlook the philosophical core of his world. The title of the film Soodhu Kavvum (Evil Engulfs) is part of the Hindu god Krishna’s sermon in Bhagavad Gita, which goes: Dharmathin Vaazhvuthanai Soodhu Kavvum, Aanaal Dharmam Irudhiyil Vellum (Evil will engulf the dharma, but the good will always triumph in the end)." Though director Nalan’s film just takes part of it, ‘Soodhu Kavvum’ is a complete statement in the context of the movie. Evil engulfs. Period. The truth doesn’t triumph here, but that doesn’t seem to be a bad thing as it looks at life with a sense of sardonic humour that is soothing and pleasurable.

Identity sets off as a film about Haran Shankar (Tovino Thomas), a boy with an abusive father, who turns him into a perfectionist with obsessive-compulsive disorder. As we expect the film to be about this eccentric personality solving cases, we are thrown into a story of a serial rapist, who blackmails his victims with videos of the crimes. When we think it is going to be about nabbing this criminal, he gets killed by an unknown person (we instantly know who it is). Alisha (Trisha), the witness of the crime, gets a peculiar disease called Prosopagnosia aka face blindness, due to an accident right after witnessing the murder, which renders her incapable of recognising faces. Now, we settle for a concept film about this person with face blindness trying to identify the killer with the help of Haran, who also happens to be a good sketch artist (thanks to his mom). But no. Identity is neither that. It keeps turning into a different film every 20 minutes. You have a gripping flight sequence where Haran tries to stop a collision. Later, we also get an enjoyable Bondish fight sequence in a private jet. Clearly, Identity has an identity crisis.

Shankar has an unrelenting confidence in his socio-political conscience, and he seems to be constantly bothered about the ills around him. Nothing else explains his grip on the anti-corruption ideas, which fuels most of his films. After the disastrous Indian 2, Shankar’s Game Changer, starring Ram Charan, is another addition to his list of political films. The filmmaker not only holds onto his politics in Game Changer but also strongly believes in the old-school commercial entertainer where the film breaks to a song every twenty minutes. In a sense, this familiar screenplay formula works in the favour of Game Changer as you know what to expect from the film at any given point. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is. Hence, there is no room for disappointment with Game Changer. That said, Game Changer, at the end of the day, is a dated film that would have probably been fresh a decade back.

Vetri Maaran’s Viduthalai Part 1, told from the perspective of a new police constable Kumaresan (Soori), posted in a rural hillside Tamil Nadu village, explored the story of an extremist organisation named Makkal Padai and its head Perumal Vaathiyar (Vijay Sethupathi). Makkal Padai has a history, but when we entered the world in the first part, the conflict was immediate as the terrorist organisation had just bombed a passenger train killing and injuring several lives. The premise answered both ‘why and why now’ of the film’s existence. It ended with the arrest of Vaathiyar, aided by Kumaresan, who is on the brink of getting disillusioned with the government’s propaganda against the organisation. The effective first part left us with many questions about Vaathiyar and how it will affect Kumaresan.

Sarathkumar tasted great success playing a moody cop in the commercially and critically acclaimed Por Thozhil (2023). Since then he has been trying to emulate its success in vain. Smile Man, his 150th film, is another such attempt, in which the actor yet again plays a brooding CBCID office grappling with Alzheimer’s disease, who is also on a hunt for a serial killer, notoriously known as Smile Man. Like most serial killer films in Tamil, Smile Man also suffers from the usual problems of convenient writing, cliches, and redundant flashbacks. Honestly, the film kicks off on a promising note. The epilogue has Chidhamabaram (Sarathkumar) chasing the serial killer only to get bashed by him after a near-fatal accident. The unknown killer swears to come back if Chidhambaram chooses to show up again as a cop. Meanwhile, we learn that Chidambaram’s partner (Sunil Menon), who is currently missing, has closed the Smile Man case, claiming that the serial killer was shot dead. Yet, in the present day, the murder starts to happen again. Bodies of victims with skin carved out to make a smiling face (the modus operandi of the killer) are found in the city, and Chidhambaram, despite his health condition, joins the force again to finish what he had started years ago.

Debutant director Mohanlal has been hung up on the 3D element of Barroz: Guardian of Treasures. So much so that every other aspect of the film has gotten little to no attention. Even Mohanlal, the incredible performer, is absent as everything about Barroz comes across as a stage play captured on camera. The only focus of the team has been to come up with various ways to gloat the 3D elements of the film on the face of the viewer. A flower bouquet will get an unnecessary slow-motion shot as Barroz extends it to Isabell (Maya Rao). The idea is to impress the audience as the flowers extend outside the screen, but even children (who seem to be the target audience of the film) lose interest as such gimmicks become redundant. Beyond the brilliant execution of the 3D technology and the superlative production design, Barroz has little to offer concerning an engaging story.

The story of Kanguva has a lot of similarities with SS Rajamouli’s Magadheera (2009), which laid the foundation for the Telugu icon to make Baahubali: The Beginning. The Ram Charan-starrer is about a street bike race, who realises that he is a reincarnation of an ancient warrior who couldn’t join hands with his love of life. He meets her again in the new life, but the villain of yore is also born again. So, the old scores get settled in an entertaining watch. In Kanguva, the romance gets replaced by a father-son bond only that the son and the father are not related by blood but much stronger drama.

By now, plasticity has become a sort of director Karthick Naren’s style. A sense of juvenility creeps in with the premise and setups of the director, despite a fairly decent execution and technical competence. A sample of such contrived writing comes even at the beginning of the first act when one of the protagonists, Sri (Dushyanth Jayaprakash), argues with his parents to let him own a mobile phone. The deliberation to establish that the character doesn’t have a cell phone is to thwart the audience from finding any logical loopholes. The problem with such writing renders Nirangal Moondru staged and artificial, distancing the audience from the characters and their stakes.

Zebra, the film’s title, could denote the game the characters play with black and white money (they call it sugar) throughout the film. It could also mean the colour grey you get when the two stripes of the animal are mixed–which would be the moral tone of almost all the characters in the movie. Incidentally, that’s how you feel about the film as well. It is neither a smooth entertainer nor a problematic drag. In essence, Zebra is an over-the-top heist thriller that is more about entertainment and less about logic and other rational thoughts. As it gets the entertaining part right, it overshadows even its worst flaw.