The reasons are too private to be discussed at a round table, listed out during a seminar, or uncovered in an academic course. A proud but insomniac connoisseur murmuring in his sleep may do a better job of explaining the phenomenon than an expert on a podium. Sreehari Nair airs his thoughts.

What follows is essentially a long scene set in a single location, and you watch in amazement as the scene grows into one of Indian cinema's funniest and most spectacular pieces of sustained craftsmanship, accumulating emotional power and subtext, growing wings and claws, becoming its own beast, applauds Sreehari Nair.

You will appreciate the Mammootty of this movie better if you do not take the servile reviews to heart, for this is a grand, broad, almost proudly comic performance, assures Sreehari Nair.

Girish AD doesn't make romantic comedies so much as he elevates the genre, observes Sreehari Nair.

Since nothing irritates Lijo Jose Pellissery more than a throwaway critical judgment, Sreehari Nair carefully presents his opinions about Malaikottai Vaaliban, a good two weeks after he first saw the movie.

Siddharth Anand's artistry bespeaks an upbringing filled with GI Joes, plastic combat boots and plastic bayonets, fake punching noises and fake sounds of gunshots, rudely interrupted by an adult voice saying, 'Beta, all this is good, but try bringing in some feelings too', observes Sreehari Nair.

If you have never seen Sriram Raghavan fly, you would hardly realise that this time, he is happy in his cage, this time he isn't reaching for the skies, notes Sreehari Nair.

This isn't a hatchet job, and my excuse for the exercise is my feeling that when you invert some of the clichés mentioned here, you might just arrive at the portals of genuine movie-making energy, says Sreehari Nair.

'As I watched Mammootty 'try out' Mathew Devassy, I could hear from my theatre seat the ready-made appreciation of the liberal press, their applause for the great actor having flirted with queerness on screen.' 'But it is a flirtation and nothing more, for I could not detect in Devassy any hint of love, not for his homosexual lover, not for his wife,,' observes Sreehari Nair.

It was a year of so many contradictions and contrasts that it became dangerous to talk about movies, people lost their heads discussing Friday releases, psychiatrists began dabbling in film criticism, and film critics turned into psychiatrists, says Sreehari Nair.

It's not uncommon for performers to become bigger than the stories they are placed in and Sreehari Nair would happily pay to watch Isha Talwar and Paramvir Singh Cheema riffing on love, bad life choices, psychology, rhythm, and oven-baked Kulchas in Chamak.

ITo steer clear of sanctimonious newspaper stories all your life, and then be saddled with movies like Kadak Singh -- now there's a rotten bit of luck worth moaning about, sighs Sreehari Nair.

They represent a new tribe whose grace and skill-sets lie well beyond my comprehension, notes Sreehari Nair.

'If it weren't for Om Puri, a whole range of our big city experiences wouldn't have found their honest representations on the screen.'

I do have a dream biopic. It has as its subject Renu Saluja, the cosmically gifted editor, with a special focus on the Vidhu Vinod Chopra-Saluja-Sudhir Mishra love story, says Sreehari Nair.

800 gets so lost in celebrating its grand subject that it forgets something pretty elementary: Cricket is a team sport!, notes Sreehari Nair.

We are back to being a country that talks about box office numbers as the measure for what an audience's real feelings about a movie are, laments Sreehari Nair.

Though the lies hardly go beyond extramarital affairs and conception problems, they are laid out by arresting storytellers who raise the stakes while speaking in tongues not wiped clean to make progressive points (No Made in Heaven-type diddling, here), notes Sreehari Nair.

Konkona Sen Sharma's short Mirror in Lust Stories 2 is a rare thing: A feminist film that is also very, very funny, states Sreehari Nair.

'The pride of the devoted Seinfeld fan is that he happens to love a show that doesn't take his love for granted, so that even on repeat viewings he is never really sure what directions an episode might take,' observes Sreehari Nair.