Jude Anthany Joseph's third feature, after Ohm Shanti Oshana and Oru Muthassi Gadha, released on Prime Video at midnight today. This seemingly feel-good film, also seemingly made in limited spaces and with a shoestring budget, tackles a concept and issue never tested before in Malayalam cinema  circles. In Sara'S, we follow the life of Sara Vincent (Anna Ben), a young, bubbly, yet unapologetic filmmaker who struggles to make it big in the industry. She continuously assists male directors and is in the scripting works of her dream film. Sara has decided, from her school days, that she would not bear any kids. This is when she meets Jeevan (Sunny Wayne); her relationship with him subsequently brings her ideology and decision into a confrontation with the established norms of society, family and child-rearing.  Anna Ben in Sara'S The best aspect in which Sara'S has excelled, without doubt, is its hard-hitting taut script. Debutant Akshay Hareesh deserves praise for managin...

Debutant Tanu Balak' Cold Case was touted and marketed as a supernatural-meets-crime-thriller flick. In this review, we look into whether the film, starring Prithviraj Sukumaran and Aditi Balan in lead roles, was able to deliver on its nail-biting, spine-chilling experience. An unidentified, putrefied skull is found by a layman from the bottom of the lake. ACP Sathyajith (Prithviraj Sukumaran) is called in to crack the case, after intense political pressure, when fingers start to turn towards the kin of a prominent politician. Due to the aged state of the discovered remnant, identifying the victim becomes a herculean task. Meanwhile, Medha (Aditi Balan), an investigative TV journalist who runs her own program on supernatural, paranormal events, relocates to a new house with her daughter. There, she begins to experience strange occurrences which lead her to uncover the reasons for them. At a point, these parallel investigations converge, as both factual and the otherworldly strive t...

Amit Masurkar's Sherni released yesterday on Amazon Prime Video. The picture is headlined by the likes of Vidya Balan, Vijay Raaz, Brijendra Kala, Sharat Saxena among others. Here's the review of this drama-cum-thriller. One reason why I was so hyped for the release of  Sherni  was that its' director Amit Masurkar's previous venture,  Newton , is one of my favourite Indian films of this decade. Newton beautifully captured the angst of a dedicated and righteous government officer, when faced with a rotting and flawed electoral system and a deceitful arena of tribal politics. In Sherni too, Masurkar crafts a world similar to Newton-  a hardworking DFO, recently posted to a forest-laden region, pitted against dual threats- one, the danger of a tigress loose in the human habitat, and the other, a decaying system of corrupt officials, red tapes and, yet again, the opportunistic politicos. For Vidya Balan's Vidhya Vincent, the tigress roaming human settlements is the ...

While the cinema industry's functioning came to a moribund standstill due to shut theatres and physical distancing measures rendering shoots near impossible, Take Off (2017) director Mahesh Narayan seems to have made the most out of this constrained environment by scripting, shooting, editing, and directing a picture, entirely shot in a virtual milieu, riding on the backs of previously produced similar films like 2014's Unfriended and 2018's Searching. c u soon, starring Fahadh Faasil, Roshan Mathew, and Darshana Rajendran, released today on Amazon Prime Video, making it the third Malayalam picture to have a direct release on an OTT platform. Director Mahesh Narayanan carries the entire narrative of c u soon through a set of video calls, personal chats, google map images, screengrabs, and everything that a laptop or phone screen can accommodate. c u soon kicks off as Jimmy (Roshan Mathew) swipes right and left on his Tinder account. When he gets a match in Anu (Darshana Raj...