

Regional Cinema
Chess Like That…Check Is A Surprisingly Watchable Potboiler
Check(Telugu)
Starring Nithiin, Rakul Preet Singh, Priya Prakash Varrier;
Written & Directed by Chandra Shekhar Yeleti
Rating: ** ½
This could be Indian cinema’s The Queen’s Gambit. Ha ha, chess kidding.
But seriously, I can’t recall many movies in India based on the game of chess. Combining the theme of terrorism with the game of chess could be seen as an audacious game-plan for any filmmaker.
Writer-director Chandra Shekhar Yeleti pulls it off. Just about. A major reason why Check works is we are never expected to take the outrageous plot seriously. What we are given is a plot that brims over with incredible twists and turns all woven together in a narration that is high on adrenaline.
It starts with Nitthiin(in a far cry from his utterly juvenile rom-com romp in Rang De seen recently) being brought to the death row for terror activities.Lawyer Rakul Preet Singh(looking as much like a lawyer as Nithiin looks a terrorist) convinced of Aditya’s guilt, fights his case until she begins to believe in his innocence. Aditya’s acumen at chess helps him get some reprieve from his death sentence.
Nithiin doesn’t hesitate in showing the character as vulnerable and frightened.
It is to the writer-director’s credit that he never lets the interest-level flag. Nor do the improbabilities swamp and smother the narrative. Rather , there is a constant effort to keep the audience engaged ,as Aditya , in all innocence, goes from one zone of adventure to another, first as a convict then as a chess champ and finally as an innocent man trying to play his way out of sure death.
Check is quite obviously a vehicle to allow its leading man a chance to showcase his acting chops.With that innocent face and disarming smile Nithiin hits home runs one after another as he gets taken for ride by the girl(Priya Prakask Varrier) who looks nothing like a closet terrorist.
The endeavour to prove a terrorist innocent reminded me of The Mauritanian where Tahar Rahim had played the terror-accused . Nithiin lacks the emotional depth to carry the role to its dark interiors. At the end he emerges battered buised but somehow triumphant. The storytelling is constantly searching for tricks to titivate the drama. Most of them work.
Other than Nithiin , it is veteran Srimannarayana who as an imprisoned chess champ serves as the hero’s mentor guide and liberator. The film has some interesting ideas on the precincts of freedom . Not keen on exploring those , Check is content skimming the surface for thrills until we reach the grand climax where Nitthin’s Aditya plays with , ahem,Grandmaster Vishwanathan Anand.
I almost expected the real chess champ to show up. Instead they have a lookalike who gives the mood a tacky tilt. But that’s okay. None of this is serious. None of it tries to be anything but entertainment. Lack of pretension and a surfeit of plotting stealth make Check worth checking out.
Regional Cinema
Subhash K Jha Selects The Best Malayalam Films of 2022

- Bheeshma Parvam: This is probably best adaptation of The Godfather in recent years. Director Amal Neerad doesn’t let us forget that this is his take on Francis Coppola’s The Godfather.And what a take it is! This masterly Malayali mafia movie is self-explanatory. Its muted violence is stifling .It creates a world so tightly wound around its own heritage of successive violence that the family unit threatens to fall apart.Sweeping in its melodrama,arching in its velocity and untameable in its epic ambitions Bheema Parvam hurls us into the world of Michael(no coincidence this Michael name-calling) Anjootty, kicking dragging and screaming.The narrative is custom-built to accommodate all the characters from The Godfather into the Malayali household.And it’s all done with a chaotic perspective on the moral and ethical dynamics of extra-constitutional violence.Even if one is familiar with the original material this ravishing remake takes you by surprise with its distending temperament and a choleric enormity whereby the violence comes in revealing welters rather than as rule.
- Salute: The Write Brothers Bobby & Sanjay are the real heroes of this clenched tale of the teacher and the taut. Interestingly two brothers in the police force, ideologically far removed from one another ,are at the crux of a film that prods at the audiences’ collective conscience while creating an edge-of-the-seat thriller about guilt and redemption. Is Salute the best screenplay that Bobby and Sanjay have written to date? The answer would have been a resounding yes, were it not for a relatively lame endgame which left me feeling a wee cheated thought not betrayed.The narrative has too much going for itself to suffer from a post-climactic depression. I would say Salute survives the end-blow most gracefully, thank you.The pacing is consciously languorous , as though the pressures to come on the drama of ideological warfare need ample breathing space to grow. Grow, the narrative does with astute velocity. While the last-half hour is compromised, the narrative remains partly breathless but pertly pacy all through.Sreekar Prasad’s editing is firstrate with the plot moving in tandem with the stressful tension that the protagonist creates when he prefers to be a pebble in the stagnant pond.Salute has a lot to say about mending broken promises. It is a coiling seething angry film about injustice and corruption set to a normalized tone which doesn’t pick on any character for poor discharge of duty.
- Dear Friend: Betrayal is a lot like a terminal illness. There is no point in talking about it. The more you do , the more bitterly ravaged it leaves you. Betrayal is best left to itself. It is , to some like me, a crime worse than physical violation. Time heals the damage to the body.What about the heart?The look that I saw in the character Jannat’s eyes at the end of Vineeth Kumar’s Dear Friend would stay with me forever. It said so much that words cannot. Not that Dear Friend is short of words. It cannot be. With five flat-mates sharing space, thoughts, dreams,peeves and, yes, a pet too, words flow.And yet Dear Friend is a very quiet film.Quiet and non-judgemental, even when one of the friends just leaves,quits,exits. Without prior notice.The friends, two of whom Jannat(Darshana Rajendran)and Arjun(Arjun Lal) are a couple, find their own way of dealing with the betrayal. Writers (Sharfu, Suhas,Arjun Lal) and director Vineeth Kumar refrain from probing into the raw wounds. It is a remarkably dry-eyed film. Where there is so much room for drama and hysteria, Vineeth Kumar choses to internalize the hurt and wounded pride .This is one of the most restrained projection of hurt and betrayal I have seen, and also one of the most dispassionate There is a wonderful lengthy sequence with the vanished friend’s mother where the four friends find out the truth about the filth of the fifth. The mother doesn’t shed a single tear.These are emotions buried too deep for tears.
- Puzhu: Mammootty in the Malayalam Puzhu is the most complex problematic father I have seen in any film since Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anupama. Mammootty plays Kuttan a blatant casteist, who has disowned his sister(Parvathy Thiruvothu) after she married a Dalit actor.Mammootty’s frighteningly prejudiced patriarch doesn’t hide his biases. He is like a bull in a china shop that makes no effort to spare crunching over fragile content.Kuttan’s autocratic arrogance is amplified when he is the company of his young son Kichu(Vasudev Sajeesh). That the 70-year Mammootty passes off as the 14-year old boy’s father is a measure of the actor’s charisma and credit. That they don’t look comfortable as father and son serves the film’s purpose just fine.Kichu is petrified of his disciplinarian dad. The boy is not allowed any space to breathe beyond school, books and parenting. He is losing out on all the pleasures that make adolescence such a rewarding adventure. The father has the boy his neck squeezing the life and breath out of him.In the beautifully designed though at times clumsily executed film,debutant director Ratheena draws drama out of the simplest of situations, like the father making his son watch the same family video every night where he is seen disciplining the boy as a toddler.Puzhu shows us how tyrannical parenting can destroy a child’s life.And hats off to Mammootty for slipping so effortlessly into such an evil character.Kuttan could have easily been played like a full-time villain. Mammootty embraces all of Kuttan’s negativity and alchemizes it into a force of inhumanly rigid nature. He is at once a despot and a weakling. His son hates him for his tyrannical behaviour. But Kuttan has his own logic, no matter how faulty and fractured, for what he is doing.In his preposterous worldview and his failure to tell discipline from despotism Mammootty makes the most despicable dad , barring Alencier Ley Lopez in Appan.
- InAriyippu streaming Mahesh Narayanan actually steps out of his home territory in Kerala and takes the protagonists to NOIDA for better prospects. As migrant workers in a glove factory Kunchacko Boban and Divya Prabhu merge so effortlessly into the migrants’ world of invisibility that if you are not familiar with these two actors’ work, you would think they are actual migrants.The only time they are called out is when someone during a scuffle mutters, “These bloody South Indian migrants.”Hareesh and Reshmi would have remained entrapped in their citadel of anonymity, like Balraj Sahni and Nirupa Roy in Do Bigha Zameen , if something terrible didn’t happen. A doctored video surfaces, showing Reshmi performing oral sex on a man not seen in the video(anonymity/invisibility has many faces in Ariyippu). This ugly incident triggers off a chain of recalcitrant actions with far-reaching consequences to the married couple’s mutual trust fund.Mahesh Narayanan’s has written a fable with irreversibly tragic consequences.
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Nagarjuna Stands by Samantha In Her Hour Of Distress

It was known for quite sometime in Hyderabad that Samantha Prabhu was suffering from a skin disorder. Now that she has so bravely confirmed that she is suffering from Myositis , the entire Telugu film industry has shown its solidarity,and that includes her former father-in-law Nagarjuna.
A source close to Nagarjuna reveals, “Nag wonders why he is being asked whether he would be reaching out to Samantha or not. Sam and Nag share a terrific rapport from long before she married his son Naga Chaitanya. Now, just because the marriage has ended, no one is an enemy here. The two families maintain cordial relations.”
About Samantha’s illness Nag was one of the first to reach out.
“It is ridiculous to even suggest that a broken marriage ends relations between the two families. At least not in this case,” asserts a family friend .
Regional Cinema
Chhello Show: India’s 95th Oscars selection Last Film Show to release in 95 cinemas at Rs. 95 ticket price!

Celebrating the magic of cinema, and considering the massive buzz around the title, the makers of Last Film Show (Chhello Show) are releasing the film on the LAST SHOWS of THURSDAY, 13th October.
While the Gujarati-language coming-of-age drama was set to release theatrically across India on Friday (14th October), audiences can now catch it in advance on Thursday night itself.
In keeping with its selection for the 95th Academy Awards, Last Film Show will now open across 95 cinemas at a ticket price of Rs. 95! This is a welcome initiative by the makers to bring LAST FILM SHOW (Chhello Show) to the widest possible audience at an affordable price, all a day in advance.
Sharing the news, director Pan Nalin said, “There has been immense excitement among fans for our film Last Film Show (Chhello Show) and we are all too happy to release it on the ‘Last Show’ of Thursday. Also, what better way to celebrate its selection at the 95th Oscars than by releasing it in 95 cinemas at a wonderful price of Rs. 95!”
Producers Siddharth Roy Kapur of Roy Kapur Films and Dheer Momaya of Jugaad Motion Pictures jointly said, “We are thrilled that our film Last Film Show (Chhello Show) is finally reaching its appropriate destination—the cinematic big screen. With our exhibitors on board, we are releasing the film in the final shows of Thursday across 95 cinemas at a Rs. 95 ticket price. This is our humble way of honouring the love and excitement audiences across India have shown for our film. “
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Madhuri Aces The Gujju Housewife’s Role In Maja Ma

Maja Ma(Amazon Prime Video)
Starring: Madhuri Dixit, Gajraj Rao, Ritwick Bhowmick
Rating: *** ½
The LGBTQ community is suddenly getting a lot of attention from Bollywood. Ayushmann Khurrana and Rajkummar Rao played gay characters recently. Now it is the divine Ms Madhuri Dixit playing a Gujarati housewife In Maja Ma who after years of obedient housekeeping is forced out of the closet.
Actor turned director Anand Tiwari(who did well for himself while helming Bandish Bandits) is on firm ground. He explores the Gujarati middleclass household and the gossipy rigidly conservative milieu with confidence. Once again after The Fame Game Madhuri plays a wife and a mother with dark secrets. This time she is more tragic than mysterious. Wordlessly she slips into her character Pallavi Patel’s pained past to dig out uncomfortable truths.
It is a bold audacious concept. The film asks some uncomfortable questions about an individual’s identity within the domestic domain. But the conclusion to an inherently messy and unresolvable situation is most convenient and unconvincing. One feels that the director has eventually taken the shortcut at the end opting for a neat resolution when there is none.
But the film is no doubt a whole lot of fun. The festive mood never slips out of the writer’s and director’s hands. Some performances particularly the redoubtable Sheeba Chadha who as the NRI PTMIC(Punjabi turned mod in confusion) is messcast, and I do mean mess-cast . She is way too over-the-top to register as anything but caricatural.
On the other hand,some of the other performances blend fluently with the ebullient mood. Gajraj Rao (as Madhuri’s supportive husband) , Ninad Kamat ,Simone Singh and Shristi Shrivastava lend solid support to Madhuri Dixit’s quietly effective performance.This is a film where the flaws are easily overlooked in favour of the larger picture .
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