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.

“The funny thing is… on the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to be a crook, “Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) says with his sarcastic wit which leaves Red (Morgan Freeman) cackling in one of many incredible scenes of The Shawshank Redemption. Pathiban (RJ Balaji) says almost the same lines in Sorgavaasal but no one’s laughing here, because Sorgavaasal is a bleak world with no room for such humour. Here things are bloody and violent, and unlike the Hollywood classic, there’s no room for home in the pessimistic world of Sorgavaasal.

Towards the third act of Amaran, Major Mukund (Sivakarthikeyan)’s father asks him, “Why is Kashmir always in trouble?" This is a crucial moment, though it is shot with a matter-of-fact tone — reflecting the overall style of the movie. It is significant because it is the only time we gain insight into Mukund’s opinion about the politics behind the bloodshed and violence in one of the most volatile regions of the country. It’s essential to understand what a soldier thinks about the politics that have placed him in a situation where his own life is at risk.

Bloody Beggar, directed by Sivabalan Muthukumar, is another bold choice by lead actor Kavin. However, it doesn’t fully deliver on its promising premise and ends up falling short in several aspects. At its core, the film struggles to find a consistent tone. It aims to be both a biting dark satire on the bourgeoisie and an emotional drama about the downtrodden, but it achieves more success with the former than the latter. The satire works to an extent, presenting exaggerated caricatures of villains who are repulsive enough to justify the violence directed at them. This offers moments of catharsis and even a few laughs at their expense. However, the emotional core surrounding the nameless beggar’s tragic past feels underdeveloped and fails to resonate in the cold, dark world of the film. Additionally, much of the humour, despite evident effort in the writing, doesn’t land as intended, making Bloody Beggar fall short of its full potential.

Sir is one of those formulaic Tamil movies with a strong cause or message it wants to put across and doesn’t mind doing so at the cost of being a didactic and dated. The style, writing, brevity, and everything that makes up for a superior form take a backseat in Sir as Bose Venkat prefers coming across as an activist to a fine filmmaker. While Sir has a noble cause at its core, the execution makes it a yarnfest, and instead of getting the catharsis such social commentary aims to provide, the film invokes a sense of guilt for feeling so.

All Rajinikanth films have some default settings. It doesn’t matter who directs him, they have to play by these rules or around it. Experimentations by the director are allowed but within the frame of the boilerplate. The success then comes down to how the proverbial ‘director’s touch’ syncs with the template of a superstar film.