Movie Reviews
Pon Ondru Kanden Movie Review: This vanilla rom-com wastes a good premise with hasty execution
Writer-director V Priya’s Pon Ondru Kanden is a love triangle, and like almost any such film, it takes a meandering route to get to its point. Siva (Ashok Selvan) and Sai (Vasanth Ravi) are childhood foes turned friends. At the start of the film, their younger selves fight it out over a classmate named Sundari. Years later, Siva is a gynaecologist and a womaniser, still looking for a girl in his life. He has flings and has such a casual idea about relationships that he does not get it when his sister sends a girl to his office for a marital arrangement. Mistaking the girl for a potential client, gynaecologist Siva makes a remark that puts her off, and the interaction ends in a slap. This scene is supposed to be funny, but the joke does not land. On the other hand, Sai has a hard time looking after his mother, who has dementia. He is a clueless guy who dresses like a gentleman, tells girls jokes that miss the mark, and eventually turns to Siva for relationship advice. Sai is the quintessential “boomer uncle,” but a dossier on him should have him riding an old scooter in place of the Bullet.
Director: V Priya
Cast: Ashok Selvan, Vasanth Ravi, Aishwarya Lekshmi
There is so much buildup for their school-and-college-time rivalry at the start, but the two guys who cannot get along with each other become thick friends just like that. Here itself, you realise that Pon Ondru Kanden is such an easy-on-the-eye film about good-natured guys where conflicts resolve themselves.
Speaking of conflicts, the film is pretty uneventful until Aishwarya Lekshmi’s Sandy makes an appearance in Sai and Siva’s lives. One of them knows Sandy from his past, but he finds it hard to talk to his friend about it because he does not want to spoil their party. There is a clever use of the ‘Pon Ondru Kandein’ song from the Sivaji Ganesan film Padithal Mattum Pothuma, with the lines, ”Nee partha pennai naan parkavillai,” which encapsulates the situation of Sai and Siva. There is also a clever juxtaposition of Sai imagining himself with Sandy in a relationship and Siva doing the same with back-to-back songs. Unfortunately, however, the same cleverness hardly extends to the rest of the screenplay.
In a bizarre stretch of storytelling, Sai tells Siva that Sandy got married at a young age; it is a point she also insists on, but there is no age difference between her past and present versions. No amount of makeup or de-ageing technology might save a film with such an archaic screenplay, but it still would not hurt to try and strive for authenticity, especially in terms of character appearances.
In another bizarre occurrence, four songs appear within 20 minutes in the middle of the film. While two of these songs take the plot forward, the others are simply crammed into the narrative. The third song follows a meet-cute moment and paves the way for a proposal scene, which catches the heroine off guard and makes her equate herself to a Mani Ratnam heroine. They get into a relationship so fast, and it could have worked, but the execution makes you wonder why the editing and storytelling are in just as much of a hurry.
Pon Ondru Kandein is a deceitful title, and the idea of the film that comes together at the end is more interesting than the execution. Two of the lead characters start to grow on you slightly the longer you watch the film, which is probably the best you could expect from such a vanilla rom-com. The three leads try to infuse some spark into the narrative but mostly give off the impression that they are in an ad film. Yet, given what Pon Ondru Kandein becomes, the fact that none of the actors takes the premise too seriously works more in favour of the film than against it, as it helps keep the tone light. That being said, it would not hurt to have some more actual comedy in the meandering climax instead of the puerile ones it does have.
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Movie Reviews
1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:
Deanna: ★★★★.5
Allison: ★★★.25
Julia: ★★
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