The Malayalam film Traffic (2011), written by Bobby Sanjay and directed by Rajesh Pillai, has a cult following. The film is cited as a must-watch to any film-goer seeking to watch a well-made film, made possible by excellent narration, befitting actors and a sound technical team.

Traffic was remade in Tamil as Chennayil Oru Naal (2013 – directed by Shaheed Kader), keeping the ethos intact. Die-hard fans of the original argued that the Tamil remake was a shade paler but still made for an engaging watch. The same, we feel, holds good for this Telugu dubbed version. Rarely does a film make you overlook inconsistencies of lipsync (something unavoidable in dubbed films) and Traffic is one of those.

The annoying portions of this version of Traffic come early in the film, in the form of a couple of songs completely avoidable for a film of this genre. But once the director is done with these commercial constraints, he takes the audience on a spell-binding ride. Traffic follows a format Hollywood has a soft corner for — race against time. The pivotal characters involved in this ride are predominantly strangers thrown together in time of a crisis.

Police commissioner Sundara Pandian (R. Sarathkumar) is faced with one of the toughest requests in his career, to use his powers and control the traffic from Hyderabad to Kodad and facilitate an uninterrupted ride for a good reason. Taking charge of this mission is traffic constable Satyamurthy (Cheran) who wants to clear the blotch on his reputation with this good deed, a youngster (Mitun as Ajmal) mourning the loss of his friend and doctor Robin Joseph (Prasanna), caught in a personal turmoil.

At the other end of the mission are film star Gautam Krishna (Prakash Raj) and his wife Radhika, counting every passing second and hoping for a miracle. The race against time is intercepted with twists and turns, leading to a nail-biting finish.

Within this framework, the director effectively narrates stories of relationships — the fallacy of love between a young married couple, a girl who looks beyond personal grief, an elderly couple for whom their son means the world and a film star realising his moment of failure.

While the director shows you the shallowness of stardom through one star, he contrasts that with what a superstar (Suriya in a guest appearance) can do by mobilising his frenzied fans.

Traffic is an example of good filmmaking. Taut narration is complemented by sincere actors (including Parvathi Menon in a brief role) and a terrific technical team.

If you haven’t watched the original Malayalam film or the Tamil remake, watch this dubbed version. Films like this are rare.

Cast: Sarathkumar, Prakash Raj, Prasanna, Radhika

Direction: Shaheed Kader

Music: Mejo Joseph

Bottomline: Take this ride and you won’t regret.

n a sense, Aaha Kalyanam is an interesting, perhaps even important, film. In a cinema culture obsessed with virginity, it’s refreshing to light on Shruthi (Vaani Kapoor), who begins a wedding-planning business with Shakthi (Nani) and gradually falls in love with him. After executing a big contract, they end up celebrating — with champagne. A woozy-headed kiss leads to sex, and she’s happy. But soon she discovers that he isn’t.

He’s confused about their relationship status. Are they just business partners or... partners? And when she casually lets slip that that night might not have meant much, he leaps at this out with visible relief. And she’s crushed — not because she’s had sex with him and he’s not going to marry her, and not because she could be pregnant, but because something that meant so much to her means so little to him. She doesn’t regret having sex, but the fact that to him it’s just sex, nothing more.

Band Baaja Baaraat mined gold from this premise. The film was an example of how relatively standard-issue rom-com fare could be transcended — indeed, made transcendent — through terrific casting, staging and a feel for both the milieu and the material. Gokul Krishna’s remake follows the original almost beat for beat, but never does anything more.

Vaani Kapoor appears so invested in pronouncing her lines right that she hasn’t any energy left for a performance. Nani gamely allows his Telugu accent to be mocked — but the role, especially during the final declaration of love, calls for much more. The supporting characters aren’t well developed (the actress who plays Shruthi’s mother is good, though). And despite some wonderfully conversational dialogue, we’re left with the strange feeling of watching a Hindi movie dubbed in Tamil, along with the realisation that a story alone doesn’t make a movie.

Genre: Rom-com

Director: A Gokul Krishna

Cast: Nani, Vaani Kapoor,

Storyline: Partners of a wedding-planning firm face problems when they fall in love.

Bottomline: Generally underwhelming.

Why do directors act? The situation, if you think about it, is a bit of a paradox. Someone who steps into the film industry to become an actor knows that he wants to be in front of the camera — he wants to be the film’s face. Someone wanting to be a director, on the other hand, wants to be the film’s voice. He knows full well that his is a life conducted behind the camera. How, then, does this crossover happen — and so frequently, in Tamil cinema?

Every time I watch a film where M Sasikumar plays the lead, I find myself beset by these thoughts — but this time, the film abets this inquiry. Bramman, directed by Socrates, is partly a “family entertainer” (about that, later), and partly a meditation on the Sasikumar persona. And it’s not just the usual self-deprecation — declaring that he never imagined himself a hero, or being told, by a sidekick, that he cannot dance. As if anticipating the question “Why are you wearing designer duds and singing romantic songs in foreign locations, while lending an ear to Santhanam’s one-liners, instead of dreaming up the next Subramaniyapuram?” Sasikumar tells us — through his character Siva, who owns a single-screen theatre in Coimbatore — that it’s not easy.

Siva’s mother is obsessed with mega-serials. His father is content with other television programmes. And his sister watches films on pirated DVDs. In addition, the single screens, where a balcony ticket costs Rs. 30, are being replaced by marriage halls and commercial complexes (and if they have to survive, it’s by screening soft porn). “I want to give people good cinema,” Sasikumar/Siva says. But...

Siva reveals that even as a boy, he was crazy about cinema, stealing film strips from the local theatre and gazing at the frames. And this obsession stuck. The fight scenes in Bramman are staged in front of cinema halls, and they come about because Siva cannot bear to see these temples defiled by audience members who put their feet up in the seats in front of them or by others who drink and relieve themselves in the premises. Siva is such a devotee of cinema that he allows himself to be shamed by Gayathri (Lavanya Tripathi) — a student of, wait for this, Mass Media. She goes about tearing posters of the films he’s screening in his theatre — and when cornered, she says that it’s not right to promote cinema near temples, schools and government offices.

And as the film shifts, in the second half, to Chennai — to Kodambakkam, the capital of Tamil cinema, where Siva ends up being asked to direct a film; in other words, we have, here, a director playing an actor playing a director — we get scenarios written around the life of strugglers in the industry, boys who follow their dreams and make short films; Tamil directors finding fame in Telugu cinema; the importance of marketing and presentation; our gruesome obsession with leaving the audience with a message; the value of the bound script (and the valuelessness of the screenwriters who deliver those scripts). And the title, we discover, stands for the creator... of cinema.

With all this, Sasikumar could have made his own movie, a scorching drama about a man with ideals forced to sell himself in the marketplace. Instead, he opts for the safer route, coating this bitter pill with the sugar of “family sentiment,” “friend sentiment,” a last-minute love triangle, and an item song.

Bramman isn’t a “mass hero” movie, thankfully — the “villain,” so to speak, is just the Corporation that demands that Siva pay up tax arrears if he wants to keep his theatre. But this major crisis, which seemed to be the film’s central plot point, is resolved with a whimper, and the story abruptly changes tracks to gaze on a dreadfully sentimental friendship. The love angle, similarly, is all over the place. These, along with the circumstance of Siva moving away from home, are portions that could have helped us invest emotionally in this story, but we get scenes like the one where Siva, calling his mother in Coimbatore for the first time, many days after moving to Chennai, asks for her vatha kozhamburecipe — she cheerfully obliges, as if she just heard from him five minutes back.

With someone else at its centre, we might have said that Bramman is just about watchable, but with Sasikumar, we begin to wonder if Subramaniyapuram was a one-off. It’s coincidence, of course, but a few days after the demise of Balu Mahendra, we have another instance of a serious-minded filmmaker hurling at us a few reels of perfunctorily shaped cinema. He could be saying: Neengal Kettavai. But is this what we asked for?

Genre: Drama

Director: Socrates

Cast: Sasikumar, Lavanya Tripathi, Santhanam

Storyline: The struggles of a cinema-crazy theatre owner.

Bottomline: Barely watchable.

Watching this film brings to mind several iconic pop-cultural references. Pink Floyd’s non-concert concert film Live in Pompeii, for instance. How young they all looked! Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour with long, long hair walk the empty amphitheatre holding up their guitars like gladiators all set to conquer the music arena. The fantastic ruins and eerie silence create a mesmeric soundscape for the band’s psychedelic sound. The grinning skull mosaic preserved from the ancient disaster site at the start of ‘Careful with that Axe Eugene’ seemed so apt.

Pompeii reminds one of Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 novel, The Last Days of Pompeii. The book was inspired by a Russian painting in Milan (sounds very Joseph Heller-esque) and in turn inspired many movies and television shows. Pompeii takes some elements from Sergio Leone’s 1959 adaptation of the novel including the climatic gladiatorial games and the leads meeting over an out-of-control chariot. The Christian element is written out and instead of the Greek Glaucus, you have Milo, a rebellious Celt.

Kit Harington, who plays Milo, seems to have stepped out of his Jon Snow avatar from Game of Thrones into another fight — not between the Lannisters and Starks but between the Romans and Celts. You could think of the many end-of-days movies Pompeii is inspired by, throw in a dash of star-crossed lovers from Titanic and spare a thought for the poor petrified doggie among the ruins of the city.

The fact that you can think of so many things while Pompeii is playing indicates that the happenings on screen are not particularly captivating. Clichés careen across the screen colliding with improbabilities, hammy acting and atrocious dialogues.

Milo is this slave-turned-gladiator who is the last surviving Celt from his village. The evil Roman (Keifer Sutherland) who slaughtered his parents and people is back in Pompeii sneering and up to no good as he casts lascivious glances at the comely Cassia. She, however, is already making cow’s eyes at Milo because of how he broke a horse’s neck. “That was the kindest thing to do,” she says tremulously with bosom heaving. There is noble African savage, Atticus, who was promised his freedom after this one last fight. Carrie-Ann Moss as Cassia’s mom is weepy (What a fall there was Trinity!).

Remember to finish all your mind wandering before the final battle because then Pompeii moves into fourth gear and is the greatest fun. Director Paul W. S. Anderson (Resident Evil) does know to set up a fight sequence. And once the Vesuvius starts erupting in right earnest after grumbling through the film (for bad acting I suppose) Pompeii is eye-popping. The 3D is used to excellent effect with ash, lava and ginormous tidal waves laying waste the city.

The third act emphatically redeems Pompeii. Yay!

Genre: Historical /Action

Director: Paul W. S. Anderson

Cast: Kit Harington, Keifer Sutherland, Carrie Ann Moss

Storyline: Gladiator and Braveheart face off on the Titanic

Bottomline: Cheap thrills courtesy Mt Vesuvius