Team FC
With satire and a love for the absurd, it becomes more than a film about the environment and the mutation we go through as a species when we mess with nature.
Directed by Kunjila Masillamani, this hilarious segment in Freedom Fight, forces us to accept our privilege for just having access to clean water and a loo at our workplace.
New-age Malayalam cinema finally got its first great horror film with Rahul Sadasivan’s Bhoothakaalam and it got there without having to rely on any cliches you’d expect from the genre.
Amal Neerad’s second film with Mammootty reminds one of the reasons why we fell in love with movies at the first place.
The first half of Hridayam remains frustrating to this day, as it tries to stuff four-years’ worth of life events into a little over an hour. But as it skips over to the other side, the coming-of-age matures a lot like its lead Arun (Pranav Mohanlal) as he hits his last 20s.
Right from the very first sequence, a montage of an everywoman getting ready to go to work with her sleeping husband’s feet extending outwards, to tiny two-second shots (like a tree-climbing Jaya being asked to get down), Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey is a film that’s as fascinating for its writing as it is for its form.
The year’s darkest comedy is bleak, depressing, screwed up and also surprising relatable.
It’s amazing how Ratheesh Balakrishnan Poduval was able to give you the feeling that you’re discovering some Pandora-like new planet with his story set in small-town Chemmeni.
This is also probably going to be only courtroom drama you’re ever going to see where the victim is desperate for his attacker to be let off scot free (he even goes ahead and pays his attacker’s fine).
Thallumaala, believe it or not, is just as trailblazing as a document that takes us deep into one of Malayalam cinema’s most overlooked sub-cultures, with a dialect, personal styles and atmospherics, single-handedly mainstreaming an entire lifestyle.