Vaazhai Movie Review: Vaazhai, based on true events from Mari Selvaraj’s life, is a film deeply rooted in his land. It tells a tragedy that unfolds through the eyes of Sivanendhan, a school kid living with his mother and sister in Puliyankulam village near Tirunelveli. Mari wastes no time introducing the back-breaking labour of carrying banana plantains, a task doubly taxing for Sivanendhan and his best friend, who juggle this work with school, leaving them without a single day off.

The film presents picturesque snapshots of the countryside, with affecting sounds that marry the harshness of their lives with the mud that they come from. From the outset, it’s clear we’re in for an earthly affair that’s firmly grounded in the backgrounds of its characters. It follows Sivanendhan (Ponvel), a young Rajini fan, as he splits his time between studies and weekend labour. His best friend Raghul (Sekar), a Kamal fan, works alongside him to help repay a loan left by Sivanendhan’s late father. Despite the constant pain from their heavy labour, the boy remains focused on his studies and finds moments of joy, like his crush on teacher Poongkodi (Nikhila Vimal).

Kani (Kalaiyarasan), a local, fights for better wages and clashes with the upper-caste landlord, showing the village’s struggles. As the story progresses, a missing cow leads to a confrontation with a broker. The narrative thus shows the consequences of missing a day’s labour, juxtaposed with the relatively normal childish joys that these kids find in school.

True to Mari Selvaraj’s style, the film dives into caste dynamics. It sets up a whole ecosystem: villagers breaking their backs in the plantation, a broker playing middleman, and when Kani tries to organise a strike, the big boss shows up to smooth-talk their demands away.

Mari tries to win the audience over with some neat little moments. There’s a hilarious debate between the kids about Rajini versus Kamal that’ll crack you up. Then, there’s Siva’s cheeky move of swiping his teacher Poongkodi’s kerchief, which turns into this sweet bond. Cue a breezy scene of Siva hitching a ride on Poongkodi’s two-wheeler to the rice mill, complete with a catchy tune. These lighter bits, sandwiched between the tough stuff, are meant to hit you right in the feels. When it works, it’s a gut-punch — both heartwarming and heartbreaking.

But there’s only so much sympathy to go around. The film’s so busy painting this black-and-white picture of the downtrodden versus the village bigwigs that it forgets to add some shades of grey. Sure, Siva’s a great kid with potential, and yes, the villagers have it rough. But when the baddies are just your typical moustache-twirling landlord types who seem to own people, it’s hard not to roll your eyes a bit. The film’s begging you to feel bad, but by making everything so cut-and-dry, it actually makes it tougher to stay connected.

The acting in Vaazhai is a standout. Ponvel and Raghul, the young leads, deliver stellar performances that keep you glued. Their on-screen chemistry is top-notch, with Ponvel especially shining as he carries the bulk of the emotional weight. Nikhila Vimal nails her role as the kind, sympathetic, and attractive village teacher. Kalaiyarasan and Dhivya Duraisamy round out the cast nicely, helping to establish the film’s social dynamics.

Craft-wise, the film holds its own. Theni Easwar’s cinematography is a highlight, capturing the countryside and banana plantations with an eye for earthy details like animals and insects. Santhosh Narayanan’s score complements the visuals perfectly, alternating between airy lightness and oppressive heat to mirror the story’s emotional beats.

Vaazhai has got heart and looks the part, but it could’ve used a bit more grey in its village tableau.

Written By: Abhinav Subramanian

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” somebody once famously said in the movies. It made utterly no sense in 1970, but even less so now. In recent decades, the apology has become all the rage.

So at the beginning of Zoë Kravitz’s “Blink Twice,” when her tech-mogul protagonist, Slater King, sits on a TV couch and says “I’m sorry” for some unexplained transgression, well, it’s a familiar scene. Pick your offender, pick your year: Famous person issues ritual apology, gets off grid for a bit (in this case, a remote island with chickens) and returns, presumably forgiven. We’ve seen it all before.

Not that it isn’t fun to watch here — especially because Channing Tatum is so delightfully, charmingly smarmy in the role. “Blink Twice” is a big swing for him as an actor and even a bigger one for Kravitz, his life partner, as director and co-writer of this stylish, ambitious, buzzy film that seems to aspire to be a gender-themed “Get Out,” or a #MeToo-era thriller with echoes of “Promising Young Woman.”

And Kravitz almost pulls it off. With the help of a terrific cast, she offers strikingly confident, brashly entertaining filmmaking, until everything seems to break down in a mess of porous storytelling. It’s not the sudden intrusion of gore that’s the issue — this is a horror film, duh. It’s the sudden departure of logic. Perhaps you won’t be able to turn away — but, unlike in Jordan Peele’s or Emerald Fennell’s above-mentioned films, you won’t necessarily be able to explain what you saw, either.

But it sure is crackling fun, until it isn’t — which is a pretty apt way to describe the experience that Frida (Naomi Ackie, excellent) has. A cocktail waitress who designs nail art, Frida lives in a rundown apartment with roommate Jess (Alia Shawkat). When the two get a waitressing gig at a fundraiser, they cleverly plot to change into slinky dresses midway so they can mingle with wealthy guests.

Turns out, it’s a fundraiser for Slater’s firm, and when Frida trips, it’s the billionaire himself who helps her up. He introduces her to his friends, and soon, Frida and Jess can’t believe their luck — they’re on Slater’s plane, en route to his very own Fantasy Island.

The water is sparkling. The champagne is, too. Frida and Jess’ closets are filled with resort wear in stylish white, matching those given the other female guests: the flaky and/or stoned Camilla and Heather, and hard-nosed, sharp-elbowed Sarah, who has eyes on Slater and thus daggers out for Frida. (Adria Arjona’s Sarah is easily the most compelling performance of the movie.)

The food, prepared by Slater’s buddy Cody (Simon Rex), is impeccable. (His other pals are played by Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment and Levon Hawke, and his therapist by Kyle MacLachlan.) Alcohol is plentiful, sheets are soft, and there’s drugs, too — to be used “with intention,” according to Slater, whatever that means. Days are long, nights are longer, and soon nobody knows what day it is anyway.

But why is that, exactly? Well, all phones were confiscated upon arrival by Stacy, Slater’s ditzy assistant — Geena Davis, a hoot but somewhat underused (and one should never underuse Geena Davis). But something deeper seems at play. We’re trying to avoid spoilers, but as Jess tells Frida, “There is something wrong with this place.”

That would be easy enough to figure out just by looking at the oddly terrifying faces of the resort workers (shades of “Get Out”) who are surely hiding something. Also: why does Frida have dirt under her fingernails? And what happened to a red stain on her dress? Weird stuff is happening.

But Frida, still, is angry that Jess is balking. They’re on a gorgeous island, and someone important is courting her. “For the first time in my life I’m here and I’m not invisible, so please,” she admonishes her friend.

And so the pretense continues — that pretense, familiar in the Instagram era, of always having a good time. “Are you having a good time?” Slater asks more than once. “Yes!” says Frida, less convincingly as time goes on.

And when everything has gone to utter bloody, gory chaos, someone still suggests, eerily: “There’s a version of this where we’re all having a good time.”

There’s a deeper undercurrent here. Women, Kravitz has posited, are always expected to smile, play the game, pretend they’re having a good time — and, she says, to “forget” the bad stuff. And so forgetting is a prominent element in her film, one we won’t spoil.

In any case, there’s indeed a version of Kravitz’s film in which we’re all having a great time — most of it, actually. She just needs to stick the landing. We’ll all be eager to see what comes next.

“Blink Twice,” an Amazon/MGM release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for strong violent content, sexual assault, drug use and language throughout, and some sexual references.” Running time: 103 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

A single line — paraphrased by countless pornos but said verbatim at a key turn in “Strange Darling” — unlocks the heart of JT Mollner’s razor-sharp psychosexual thriller.

“I’ve never put it THERE before,” says someone in a scene that shouldn’t be described.

This horror movie is the best kept secret to come out of Fantastic Fest 2023. Until now, almost everything the public has heard about this magnificent slasher deconstruction was an intentional and ingenious misdirect. From its opaque title to its overly slick poster, this blood-soaked Trojan horse is rarely what you would expect. That’s true even and especially when it’s riffing on iconic tropes.

An excruciating chase film, a terrifying puzzle-box whodunit, and a testament to romanticizing even the darkest cinema in glowing 35mm, “Strange Darling” is an outright triumph. That much you can know now, although the following review treads very carefully to avoid spoilers.

Audiences going in with the least knowledge of what you could call a gut-wrenching date night will have the best crack at enjoying this movie in theaters — but there’s more than plot to recommend Magenta Light Studios’ jaw-dropping first feature. Yes, writer/director Mollner’s exacting script is a lean, mean vivisection of humanity’s never-ending hunt for a serial killer. Told nonlinearly, with chapter names signposting its story out of order, “Strange Darling” plays like an even more volatile “Pulp Fiction,” cocaine included.

But it’s also proof that actor Giovanni Ribisi has been hiding out as one of Hollywood’s greatest living cinematographers — a fact laid to bare in some of the most beautiful murders this side of Dario Argento’s “Deep Red.” The main cast further asserts themselves as top talent in the kaleidoscopic world of meta-performance. After a brief black-and-white vignette sets the stage with an instantaneous jump-scare, you’ll meet “The Lady” (Willa Fitzgerald) and “The Demon” (Kyle Gallner) in an opening sequence that feels ripped from the throat of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

Sprinting across an Oregon field in ruby-red scrubs — eyes wide like a deer, pallid skin bouncing in slow-motion — the enigmatic bleach blonde has crimson oozing from her ear. What happened there? The Lady is followed by a blitzkrieg in scarlet plaid, but we won’t see The Demon reach maximum fury until the high-octane car chase that follows. (It’s a brief but rip-roaring scene that might just make contemporary audiences understand why some of the earliest movie-goers once feared a train bursting through the big screen.) No, here The Lady is alone, credits in the foreground and the melodious “Love Hurts” floating somewhere overhead. It’s the first in an endless cascade of clashes designed for second-guessing.

The Demon might not catch up to her yet, but you’ll still feel the breath trapped in your throat as the seething actors and red-on-red shades emanate an angry delirium. Mollner begins his six-parter smack-dab in the middle with “CHAPTER 3: CAN YOU HELP ME? PLEASE?” but the filmmaker clues the audience in on a couple of other things before that. A tightly written crawl says the nightmare you’re about to witness is based on a true story (it’s not) and that it chronicles the last days of an especially sadistic murderer (that part is true…technically).

“Strange Darling” can do straightforward brutality with the best of them. And yet, throughout the film, the actors’ playful portrayal — dipping in and out of an ever-shifting dynamic that seems too complicated to write down, let alone embody — recalls something like Mia Goth’s dazzling performance in “Pearl.” Fitzgerald tests her endurance in some delicately drawn-out one-shots, while Gallner makes his bid for small-time scream king armed with a shotgun and an assuredness that feels like its own assault. Comparisons between “Strange Darling” and most other modern horror movies should stop there, if only because the timelessness these singular characters capture can make even great genre efforts look trite.

Before saying anything of his nightmarish story, Mollner makes a point of including another slate: “SHOT ENTIRELY ON 35MM FILM.” That self-indulgent choice in a horror movie might make some cinephiles scoff, but Ribisi earns the recognition. This isn’t Mollner’s first rodeo — the writer/director made “Outlaws and Angels” before this — and he knows what he’s got. As the tension builds past what even the characters can take, their director wants your eyes open enough to admire what his director of photography has achieved. The lighting and relighting of a single wig in this film deserves its own featurette.

Editor Christopher Bell proves equally essential, assertively reorienting audience perspective with an almost comic relentlessness. Bell’s scalpel-like cuts are meant to screw with your head. That may prove too challenging for some viewers, who will already be high on a supply of arresting violence and original tracks by alt-rock musician Z-Berg. And yet, the dreamy core of “Strange Darling” will push real genre fans forward — finding revelatory relief in comedy so black it could make even a non-smoker want a cigarette.

When The Lady encounters an older couple living in an idyllic cabin in the woods, Barbara Hershey and Ed Begley Jr. complete the cast. She’ll struggle to decide if they’re friend or foe, but it’s the rock-solid actors’ relationship with each other that will be talked about when “Strange Darling” is in the rearview. Genevieve and Frederick are introduced in a scene that silently shows them making breakfast. Jam. Syrup. Sausages. Pancakes. Four sticks of butter… with whipped cream on top?! Their intimacy — built on the back of a gross-out recipe that could only be discovered by people who are totally and alarmingly in love — gifts Hershey what may prove to be the best acting beat of her career.

Electric and unforgettable, “Strange Darling” lives up to its maddening moniker. In a summer movie season that’s been middling at best, this is a must-see — a feat of filmmaking so extraordinary you’ll wonder if it could ever truly be spoiled. You’ve met this man and this woman. You know these tropes and their horrors. But in this exceptionally slippery film, somehow never once losing its traction, you’ve never seen “it” put “THERE” before.

Grade: A

From Miramax, Spooky Pictures, and Magenta Light Studios, “Strange Darling” is in theaters August 23.

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