Imagine this. You live under a tyrannical regime that controls every aspect of life. Protest means arrest. Arrest means torture. Torture means forced confession. Confession means endless prison or death. Survival is accidental, not guaranteed. Now imagine that years later, you encounter the man who tortured you. What do you do?

This is the unsettling moral premise of It Was Just an Accident, directed by Jafar Panahi. A minor road accident triggers a confrontation with the past. Vahid, a mechanic,…

There are some films that leave you with a quiet smile and a small ache by the time the credits roll. Sarvam Maya is one of those films. It belongs to that tender subgenre where romance, grief, and the supernatural gently overlap. Yes, it may remind you of films like Just Like Heaven (2005) and a few Asian counterparts, but the familiarity never overwhelms the film’s emotional honesty. Its heart is firmly in the right place.

Sarvam Maya follows Delulu,…

How do people narrate a story to an actor or producer? I have heard stories about how some directors would narrate with meticulous detailing. After watching Sketch, I have been thinking how Vijay Chander (Vaalu) would have described the story to Vikram? What would have made the actor choose such a movie? The number of slow-mo shots or the action sequences or it could be the stereotypical dance routines, or it could have been the Geminish hand gesture style or…

Mari Selvaraj has been trying to tell us that the real antagonist in our lives is not an individual but the societal hangover of caste. His antagonists have always been stand-ins for the socio-political issues woven into everyday life, yet some audiences still mistake them as personal villains. Bison (Kaalamadan) continues this journey, but in a subtler and more introspective way.

Kittan (Dhruv), his father Velusamy (Pasupathy) and sister Raji (Rajisha) just want to live a simple life. Kittan only…