The hits and misses of the week.
In a year of overwrought spectacles that slavishly sucked up to the audience, I found refuge in a bunch of 'mainstream' Indian films that espoused such old-fashioned values as dedication to craft, close observation and casual bravery, explains Sreehari Nair.
'What guides Monsoon Wedding through and through is Mira Nair's openness as a film-maker,' observes Sreehari Nair.
The box office report for the year so far ain't good.
Bloody Brothers is watchable, especially in the scenes of its two lead actors trying to work out something from the puny material given to them. Jaideep Ahlawat, who suggests roiling energy and intelligence even when he is completely motionless, has to be India's finest actor on current form, observes Sreehari Nair.
I am yet to encounter an anthology of films (made in this country or elsewhere) in which every feature has adhered to a minimum level of quality, asserts Sreehari Nair.
I thought Saudi Vellakka a glancing, loving depiction of the judicial system as a pageantry filled with performers trying to do right by everyone, do everything by the book, and failing despite their best attempts, observes Sreehari Nair.
Karan Johar keeps his hit run intact with Student of the Year 2.
Pinch your nerves, and trust the ghoul -- blood will be spilled; women, children, and grouchy old men will be dismembered! observes Sreehari Nair.
RRR isn't the "spectacle" it is made out to be, argues Sreehari Nair.
I cannot think of another Hindi movie that has, without so much as a hint of cynicism or speechifying, brought out that fundamental fact of Muslims being an integral part of the Indian culture while being at the same time a subculture with its own polite niceties, observes Sreehari Nair.
Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam is a masterpiece, and like most masterpieces of the cinema, it's a great act of folly, observes Sreehari Nair.
Does the "story" of a Mani Ratnam film come first or does its "spirit" asks 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.
The films that fared badly at the box office.
'What was previously buried in the sands of time now gets buried by the weight of banality,' notes Sreehari Nair.
'Tamhane's densely composed shots achieve what a vacuously whizzing camera seldom does.' 'Like those Renaissance Paintings in which a bewitching lady is shown posing for a portrait, and daily life plays out in a corner unruffled, Tamhane's static frames have a hundred interesting things happening within them,' observes Sreehari Nair.
'Dibakar Banerjee isn't simply giving a particular fascistic regime the finger.' 'Here, he wants to offer us a preview of the invisible forces and human tendencies that drive fascism, blind conformity, and mass hysteria,' says Sreehari Nair.
After a lifetime of showing us what it means to 'act at the top of one's bent and never hit a false note', Mammootty had the good sense, in the third act of his career, to pare down his style, become less mannered, draw directly from life. And getting a performer like that to play characters who seem 'completely dead inside', is, in my view, a betrayal of his legacy, his still-burning ambition, and his still-sharp feelers, observes Sreehari Nair.
A serial killer may be insane; a show about a serial killer need not be a celebration of his insanity.
There's the excitement of watching minor people commit major crimes and watching how that becomes their second nature, almost. Just when you think the show is extending outwards, it implodes. And with the ethical hinges off totally, you, the viewer, wouldn't know quite how to react, observes Sreehari Nair.
Movies, like all forms of great art, are not meant to tell us how we ought to be, but honestly document how are.
Friendships are not merely severed, but built over scuffles. And just about anything can stir things up -- a long-standing feud, a pointless stare, a disrupted moral stance, a fist that ricochets off a face and smacks another face in the near vicinity, observes Sreehari Nair.
Despite its stiffness, in Aarkkariyam, a supernatural glow does shine out of the ordinary.
Sreehari Nair could not put up with turgid and self-serious ones like Super Deluxe and Gully Boy. His list of favourite Indian movies of 2019 contains just five names.
De De Pyaar De is a Radio Play being passed off as a Motion Picture, says Sreehari Nair.
Looking at Shah Rukh Khan's unusual onscreen professions.
The world according to Neeraj Pandey. Observed by Sreehari Nair.
What holds It's Not That Simple together is the cast; performers who frequently rise above their stodgy lines to bring something personal to the table, notes Sreehari Nair.
Badhaai Do carries its audience on the wave of those little farces that come with being queer in India, a land where masculinity still has some say, observes Sreehari Nair.
The second season of City Of Dreams has more pulp, hardly any juice, feels Sreehari Nair.
'The response to savagery and mass injustice is never a persistent howl.' 'There will be, among the victims, those who choose to forget the scars, those who go on living, those who challenge the overall environment of sentimentality.' 'And the more effort you put into including these other voices, into assimilating these spoilsports, the more balanced your depiction of the tragedy in question will be,' observes Sreehari Nair.
Dear Friend is for those who idealised Dil Chahta Hai all out of proportion, and then warmed up to the premise that friendship could be a lot more complicated, and transient, observes Sreehari Nair.
Sacred Games 2 is an upgrade, and is shaping up to be one of India's great cultural events, feels Sreehari Nair.
'Once Mohanlal's ever-swelling entourage grasped his enormous worth, once it realized that the innate Mohanlal appeal could be profited from, it set about to exploit, to make uproars, to create the Mohanlal brand.' 'And he wasn't meant to be a brand. He was meant to be an artist, a tireless explorer of the unique seas inside him,' asserts Sreehari Nair.
In Maqbool, Vishal Bhardwaj did a Godfather; in that he took something that was pulpy and fast and gripping, and made out of it something timeless and grand, feels Sreehari Nair.
Pellissery's women continue to express the beauty in our common humanity. And often, these women go so far into expressing our hopes, desires, absurdities and follies that they end up acting at variance with the ethical prescriptions of our age. And this, I believe, is precisely why they remain "invisible" to a whole bunch of viewers, says Sreehari Nair.
The difference between watching a movie on a laptop in your apartment and watching it on a big white screen is almost spiritual, notes Sreehari Nair.
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