Movie Reviews
Veera Dheera Sooran – Part 2 Movie Review: A mostly solid action thriller undone by a conventional, weakly written third act
Veera Dheera Sooran – Part 2 Movie Review: SU Arun Kumar’s Veera Dheera Sooran begins in a most intriguing manner. The filmmaker drops us in the middle of a developing situation with hardly any setup to give us an idea of why things are happening. This instantly makes us get involved with the film — even though we hardly know anything about its plot or character.
A woman lands up at the door of Periyavar/Ravi (Prudhvi Raj, cast against type in a serious role), a local big shot with criminal links, of doing away with her husband. Her husband, meanwhile, complains to SP Arunagiri (SJ Suryah, fine balancing the greyness of the character to keep us guessing) that his wife and daughter are missing. This provides the cop with the ammo that he’s been looking for to take down Periyavar and his son Kannan (Suraj Venjaramoodu, making an impressive debut in Tamil), who had played dirty with him a decade ago. Arunagiri plots an encounter killing prompting Periyavar to reach out to his erstwhile viswasi Kaali (a robust Vikram who offers a peek into the mass avatar of his Dhool and Saamy days), who has given up his violent ways and is now leading a peaceful life with his wife Kalai (a competent Dushara Vijayan even makes us overlook the huge age gap between her and the male lead) and their two children.
Arun Kumar keeps the tension alive by making Kaali vulnerable as he pits him against three individuals who he cannot trust and yet do their bidding as they slyly use his family as a threat in their own ways. At least until the intermission, the director holds back from giving us any peek into their shared history. All we get are mere mentions of events and names from their past — especially an incident that they refer to as ‘Sudhakar sambavam’ — which has led them all to this powder keg of a situation. This actually forces us, the audience, to individually imagine what might have happened, and pick characters to root for as well as hate.
And tense action keeps unfolding as there are cat-and-mouse-game-like scenarios and near-miss episodes that keep us hooked. One particular scene, involving landmines (or “kezhangu”, as the characters call it) delivers edge-of-the-seat thrill, and another, which marks the meeting of Kaali and Arunagiri gives us a whistle-worthy mass masala moment.
The film would have remained unique and engaging (and also justifying the Part 2 in the title) if Arun Kumar had trusted his audience and chosen to show us only the events that unfold during this one night. Perhaps he felt breaking the convention of providing a flashback would be too risky a move, but the director decides to give us the back story (at least the portions that matter), including the ‘Sudhakar sambavam’. This is where the film begins to lose its individuality as the back story that we eventually get doesn’t match with what we have all built up in our heads all through the first half; rather, it just feels so routine!
The film does recover from this minor setback when it gets back to the present with an ambitious one-shot set piece (shot with dynamism by Theni Eswar, whose night-time cinematography is one of the film’s strong points) that begins with a group of characters discussing who among them could be the black sheep and moves on to a shootout between cops and gangsters, and then to a heroic moment.
But then, just when we expect it to soar higher, it helplessly remains stuck on the ground. Like someone painstakingly building a house of cards and finally making a move that brings most of the structure down, Arun Kumar undoes all the earlier good work with a weakly written third act (despite its title, this is not the film where we can willingly suspend disbelief when its hero gets back up after being thrashed and even shot at by over a dozen men) that leaves us with a slightly bitter aftertaste. And the director himself seems to have realised this and decides to bank on nostalgia (yes, with THAT Vikram song!) to inject some energy into his limp climax.
Arts
You, Me & Tuscany
Director: Kat Coiro
Will Packer Productions, Universal Studios
In Theaters: 04.10.2026
A long-held notion within the current film social media-scape is that the romantic comedy is essentially dead. While I can point to many contemporary films that prove that notion wrong, it would be dishonest for me to say that these complaints are unfounded. I would point to last year’s Materialists as the perfect example of the themes relevant in today’s romantic comedies. It feels introspective, while also interrogating the importance of love within the current economic and social landscape. It is a movie that asks the audience to interrogate their expectations and boundaries around love, which is also why it inspired so much division and discourse upon its release, because it asked the question, “What does it mean to fall in love in this day and age?” The truth is that the romantic comedies that so many people yearn for make love look easy; they harken back to the early 2000s, where falling in love was the easy part, everyone was wearing magazine-worthy outfits and all of it was about simply fixing any external obstacles that stood in the way of that love just to get to the happy ending. The good news is, You, Me & Tuscany fully delivers on those requests.
Anna Montgomery (Halle Bailey, The Little Mermaid, The Color Purple) is an aspiring chef working gigs as a housesitter. Due to the untimely loss of her mother, she lives vicariously through her clients’ luxurious lives. After getting fired by one of her clients, Anna heads to the hotel her friend Claire (Aziza Scott, One of Them Days) works at and meets Matteo Costa (Lorenzo de Moor, Another Simple Favor), a handsome Italian actively avoiding his family’s expectations. After talking about each other’s hopes and dreams, Anna feels inspired to finally travel to Tuscany and reignite her culinary passion. However, due to her on-the-whim decision, Anna has nowhere to stay once she arrives, so she breaks into Matteo’s vacant villa as a last-ditch solution. Her problems only compound after Matteo’s family mistakes Anna for his fiancée, and she develops feelings for Matteo’s cousin/adoptive brother, Michael (Regé-Jean Page, Bridgerton, Dungeons & Dragons), all while trying to keep up her charade.
You, Me & Tuscany is a love letter to the romantic comedies of the late 90s and early 2000s. For better or worse, it follows the tropes and formulas of those films to a tee: take a plucky young heroine, a wacky situation and a model-level love interest with whom she doesn’t get along at first, add a dusting of comedic hijinks for good measure and you have yourself a perfectly breezy watch. All the things you could want from a romantic comedy of that caliber are here. It gives people the fantasy of finding love in an unexpected yet beautiful place, where everything else just melts away.
My main criticism of the movie may not even come from the film itself, but rather my own clouded vision living in these times. While I don’t need there to be explicit mentions of the trials and tribulations of current events, it is obvious that these characters live in a world divorced from reality. I mean, once Anna gets to Tuscany, everyone there speaks perfect English. This is indicative of the film’s main flaw: it’s all too easy. Yes, Anna’s character has dealt with tragedy, and while there are scenes that explore that, it all feels more like set dressing rather than something to overcome. For some, that may work, especially in a world where Black women are expected to perform at a higher level than their white counterparts just to earn the same rewards; this sort of breezy storytelling is a welcome change of pace. This might also be the time to mention that writer-director Nina Lee revealed that the future of her project and any other Black-led project is contingent on the success of this film, even though many other Black filmmakers have nothing to do with this film. It’s a searing reminder that for Black-led films, being great still isn’t good enough.
Despite that, the film has many positives. Bailey and Page are both equally charming, and their chemistry is palpable from their first interaction. They play off each other well, as well as with the rest of the cast, who offer up plenty of jokes. The lighting is also a highlight as the scenes are drenched in rich and warm colors that make the film feel inviting. Bailey plays a bubbly and clever character well, and it is easy to root for her, even during her more questionable decisions. All in all, You, Me & Tuscany offers something familiar yet comforting. It wraps you up in a warm hug and encourages you to chase your dreams and find fulfillment in the places you least expect. For as by the numbers as it is, there is a beauty in its simplicity. —Angela Garcia
Read more film reviews by Angela Garcia:
Film Review: Forbidden Fruits
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(WSYR-TV) — An apex is the highest level, the ultimate height and Charlize Theron says the action-thriller currently on Netflix may just be the ultimate filmmaking experience in her distinguished career. She plays a woman seeking solitude, only to end up in a cat-and-mouse game opposite a hunter played by Taron Edgerton. Our ‘Movie Guy’ Brian Miller is here with his take on “Apex.”
Power Ballad, 2026.
Directed by John Carney.
Starring Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas, Peter McDonald, Marcella Plunkett, Rory Keenan, Keith McErlean, Paul Reid, Beth Fallon, Havana Rose Liu, Jack Reynor, Naoimh Whelton, Mae Higgins, Ian Dillon, Kelly Thornton, Ebimie Anthony, Ruby Conway Dunne, Dean Panter, Juliette Crosbie, Robert Mitchell, Martha Breen, Dylan Kelly, Kellie El Mayss, and Alexa Scout Fagen.
SYNOPSIS:
Rick, a washed-up wedding singer, and Danny, a fading boy band star, bond over music and a late-night jam session. When Danny turns Rick’s song into a hit, Rick sets out to reclaim the recognition he believes he deserves.
Co-writer/director John Carney (here crafting the screenplay alongside supporting actor Peter McDonald) has an established track record of contemporary musicals with catchy original tunes that have long been flying under the radar for Academy Award consideration, but it should also be pointed out that the success of his films also comes from placing a sharp and acutely insightful emphasis on the creative process and the characters themselves. That is especially true for his latest work, Power Ballad, which features Paul Rudd as an Ireland-based wedding singer cover band frontman, Rick Power, perhaps like many of us coming into the film, still living in another time, or maligning the fact that rock and roll, for the most part, is dying off to other genres, particularly bubblegum mainstream-friendly pop.
As such, Rick’s next gig takes him and the band to Los Angeles for the wedding of a relative of once-popular musician Danny Wilson (played by Nick Jonas, which gives viewers some idea of the music the character creates), failing to keep up with his fellow boy band mates, who have all apparently gone on to bigger and brighter things in the wake of breaking up and going their separate ways. In the hours after the ceremony, they drunkenly get together to kick around ideas, experiment with collaborating on music, and mostly conclude that, while they may come from different genres with wildly different perspectives on art and on each other, there is real talent. In the moment, it appears that mutual respect has been agreed upon.
That only lasts for about 6 months, when Rick Power, amusingly, finds out while walking around a mall that Danny has taken the song he wrote, ” I Can’t Write a Song Without You”, slapped a bridge on it, and become a worldwide sensation without even asking if he would like to be cut into a fraction of the profits. More frustrating and possibly even defeating regarding the happiness of his family is that neither Rick’s wife (Marcella Plunkett) nor his teenage daughter (Beth Fallon) expresses any belief that he could be capable of writing those lyrics. On some level, it’s also likely humiliating that said daughter, who regularly playfully mocks his songwriting ideas, sings along to the hit song.
And since this is a John Carney film, the song is undoubtedly going to stick with viewers not only for its catchiness and rhythms, but also for what the lyrics mean for each character and art bearing a more personal meaning to the actual creator, who oftentimes might be the only one who knows the true emotional core and intent behind it. For Danny, it seems like a love song, but throughout, there is a sense that it might have meant something else to Rick when they were originally writing it together. Meanwhile, whenever Danny shows a trace of an awakening consciousness regarding his lack of moral ethics, his manager (played by John Carney regular Jack Reynor) is there to insist he bury those feelings, that it would be a bad look if word got out he mostly stole the song from a wedding singer of all people.
Nevertheless, with The Wedding Singer‘s DNA in its humor, the ensuing spiral eventually leads Rick Power (with Paul Rudd channeling some of that effortless charm into righteous anger) and his loyal bandmate, Sandy (Peter McDonald), to Los Angeles to confront Danny in person. Naturally, there are plenty of laughs along the way, all while the storytelling shifts into emotional territory, where it is no longer just about being cheated out of fame and fortune but about pursuing the truth and having that ambition and talent validated. For as much as Danny’s reasonings and justifications will make one want to punch him in the face, there is also some merit to his argument that no matter how good a piece of art is, it’s also about how it is packaged and who is putting it out there in the world.
This might also sound like a film with predictable plotting, which is true, but only to an extent. Some characters are confoundingly shoved aside, others are entirely one-dimensional, and there are a number of contrivances here to set the conflict in motion, not to mention the occasional scene that is perhaps a bit too much (a car accident that is almost immediately brushed off and comes to feel unnecessary in hindsight, for example), but there are genuinely subversive qualities in how this story unfolds, where it goes, and where it ultimately ends up.
That is also what lends Power Ballad much of its power: it’s not about lingering and hammering home those emotional beats and reveals, but about tucking them away into something smaller and more minimalist that turns out to be much more moving and sincere.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
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