Member Reviews

While most filmmakers focus on the bigger aspects of their story to substantiate the so-called big-screen experience, C Prem Kumar belongs to a niche group of directors who like to concentrate on the finer, intimate moments of life. Probably because of his time spent behind the viewfinder as a cinematographer, Prem’s scenes look like animated still photographs, and just like his directorial debut 96, his sophomore outing Meiyazhagan is a series of moments in motion.

Vijay Antony is on a spree with his recent films. While his contemporaries rarely churn out a couple of releases each year, the music director-turned-actor starred in four films last year and his latest release Hitler marks his third outing of 2024. But given how almost all of them turned out to be underwhelming, it feels like he’s shooting for quantity over quality, and Hitler, unfortunately, is the latest addition to that list.

When a man who wears his masculinity on his sleeve laments at how his son is growing up, displaying feminine traits, his wife tries to make him understand the importance of accepting an individual’s natural expression of gender. This segment and the portion that follows gives writer-director Hasith Goli’s Telugu film Swag the much-needed emotional anchor. Until then, the narrative is like a satire, with elements of farce and ‘absurd theatre’ as the several characters played by Sree Vishnu and the dual characters of Ritu Varma slug it out to assert the power of male versus female.

Being a true-crime drama in the Indian streaming landscape is like being an aspiring batsman in India’s cramped bylanes and crowded fields. Everybody is one — and everybody is advised to be one. Consequently, it’s harder to stand out. The default level has to be high: an engrossing story, a solid cast, a sense of place and time, technical competence. Most shows opt for an atmospheric setting to conceal a convoluted plot; the logic is that a visually striking tone will compensate for pacing and structural issues. In other words, the style can distract from a lack of substance. But Manvat Murders, helmed by Aatmapamphlet (2023) director Ashish Avinash Bende, is a Marathi-language series that does the reverse.

“Let’s give the people what they want,” Lady Gaga’s Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (aka Harley Quinn) declares at a key moment in Joker: Folie a Deux. That seems odd coming from a film that is committed to giving audiences quite the opposite.

Conjuring up a life that plays out in a virtual space - in other words, setting up a gauzy existence that floats in a dimension far removed from the real and the tangible - has its wages. Vikramaditya Motwane’s inventive, sparky CTRL examines the nature and extent of the toll that burrowing into a rabbit hole of constructed personas and enhanced engagements can extract.

A cautionary tale on cybercrime and artificial intelligence, CTRL works like a ready reckoning on online behaviour for social media junkies and feels like it has been designed to showcase the budding talent of Ananya Panday. Many of us have yet to recover from the shenanigans of Bae when director Vikramaditya Motwane unleashes the effervescence of Ananya in yet another variant of the coming-of-age template for Gen-Z.

With Ctrl, a cautionary tale about the world’s obsession and our near-total dependence on online apps, Vikramaditya Motwane has moved firmly into the future. Or is it the present? Isn’t this what the geeks have been creating with their gaming universes, where your digital avatars are the better, shinier versions of you? Where they slay all the monsters, and leave you — or rather, your avatar — fully in control?

In 2018, Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching put the life in screenlife. It marked the natural progression of ‘screenlife storytelling’ — a visual format where events happen entirely on computer screens, smartphones and cameras — into the real world. Until then, the horrors of technology had been literalised by the found-footage and supernatural genres. But Searching featured a father who looks for his missing daughter by following her digital footprints. His internet sleuthing reveals how little he really knew her; the technology he uses to find her is what had isolated her to begin with. Vikramaditya Motwane’s CTRL goes a step further; it expands the plausibility of the genre by unfolding in an age that puts the screen in screenlife. CTRL marks its progression into the reality of a virtual world — one where being watched is simply a natural consequence of feeling seen.

The ritualistic Manwat Murders which brutally claimed the lives of innocent children and women and shook Maharashtra in the 70s, does it again. Amol Palekar had already put it effectively on screen in Akriet (1981).