My top Tamil Movies of All Time

The list of movies along with a short synopsis for each movie could be found in this Facebook page.

This list was a long time coming and it was a chance to showcase the brilliance of Tamil movies. It is to be noted that this list is representative of Tamil cinema fans, rather a list of the movies that I enjoyed the most both for their artistic and entertainment values. This list contains not only the art-house cinema but also the mass commercial movies, action thrillers, murder mysteries etc. It is collage of movies catering to various segments of audiences but at the same time that managed to impress me. I’d watch most of these movies any day given an opportunity.

Tamil cinema is one of those movie industries where good movies are appreciated by the audiences. Even purely artistic movies have become blockbusters. The golden period of Tamil cinema was the 80s. Directors such as Maniratnam, K.Balachander, Balumahendra, Bhagyaraj & Bharatiraja (Famous Five) have made some scintillating movies during the 80s and these movies are favorites even for the current generation. The list may contain many movies from the 21st century but the seeds for most of those were sown during the 80s. Directors who came out of the school of the Famous Five have also contributed with some great movies in the 90s and the 200Xs.

Maniratnam tops the directors with as many as 10 movies of his featuring in the list, closely followed by K.Balachander with his 9 movies. With music being an important part of Indian Cinema, a movie’s success largely depends on the composer’s work as well. Ilayaraja is clearly the leader with 31 movies in the list followed by Rahman at second with 10 movies. On the Actors list, Kamal is really my favorite with 17 movies of his making to the list followed by Rajini with 6 and Sivaji with 5. Revathi tops the list of actresses with 6 movies followed by Sridevi with 4.

In Tamil movie Industry, or rather in any movie industry across India, the widespread problem is that we don’t look into books for adaptation. Nor we do have a talented pool of scriptwriters. The burden of storytelling usually resides with the director and in some cases a good scriptwriter tries a hand at direction. It’s the convergence of these two arts that is resulting in mediocre attempts. Take K. Balachander for example – most of his movies have been inspired from Tamil novels. He doesn’t worry about creating a great story and rather concentrates on how to effectively put across a already written story.

As I mentioned before, this list is my personal opinion. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add more good movies to the list in the future.