From Lokah resurrecting folklore with fire to Sabar Bonda holding silence like a confession, this is the cinema that cut straight to the bone this year
Artwork by Shradha Raul
This year nudged Indian storytelling into a quieter, more contemplative space. As Indian cinema and TV shows went through an indie-fication of sorts, the noise around big openings and star worship felt far less important than the emotional charge of a well-observed moment, characters who breathe like real people, and the willingness to confront subjects that mainstream storytelling often pushes to the margins. A shift was visible everywhere — in the deliberate pauses, in conflicts that resisted quick, climactic payoffs, and in the thoughtful, grounded way filmmakers explored families, friendships and local communities. Audiences gravitated toward stories that recognise ordinary life as worthy of cinema, and filmmakers trusted viewers to watch with curiosity instead of impatience. Here’s our list of the 25 best Indian films and TV shows that cut through the clutter this year.
Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound begins with a quiet dream shared between two boys in a North Indian village, one Dalit, one Muslim, and unfolds into something far more bruising than its modest opening suggests. The film turns away from the manufactured intensity that Indian cinema often leans on and instead sits inside silences, small gestures and the steady accumulation of helpless rage. Ishaan Khatter and Vishal Jethwa portray friendship without varnish, and the filmmaking mirrors that restraint: the camera holds, the music rarely intervenes, and emotion surfaces without needing any prompting. By looking at the 2020 exodus through the lens of caste and childhood, Homebound becomes a film that feels both urgently contemporary and already part of the country’s cinematic memory.
It was nearly impossible to ignore the swell around Chhaava this year. Laxman Utekar retells the life of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj through the figure of a young ruler caught between inherited duty and a fate shaped by brutality. Vicky Kaushal plays him with fierce physical command and an unguarded longing that peeks through the armour. The battles unfold with imposing scale and devotional detail, and the film moves with the charged rhythm of a crowd that knows this history by heart. For many, that emotional tide was reason enough to stay. For others, its sense of certainty left little room for ambiguity. What’s even more unmistakable is the force with which Sambhaji returned to the centre of popular imagination.
This Marathi film is small in the way a hand on your shoulder is small: easy to miss if you are looking for spectacle, impossible to forget once you feel it. A middle-aged man returns to his village after his father’s death rituals, and re-enters a relationship with Balya, the childhood friend who has always been more than that. Built through glances, shared chores and old jokes, it traces bodies that once loved and later learned to hide it. Kanawade, drawing from his own experience of coming home after his father’s death, chooses acceptance over crisis. Sundance recognized it with the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, acknowledging how gently it moves the needle for queer Indian cinema.
Vikramaditya Motwane’s Tihar-set series may be the most finely crafted piece of Indian streaming this year. Adapted from Sunil Gupta’s memoir, it watches a young jailer walk into Tihar in the 1980s only to realize that the prison is not a backdrop — it’s its own country with its own constitution. Zahan Kapoor plays Gupta as a man constantly recalibrating his ethics while Rahul Bhat’s DSP Tomar embodies the system’s hard, pragmatic face. The show takes its time, observing how power shifts through small negotiations, subtle hierarchies and everyday bargains. Even figures like Charles Sobhraj and Ranga-Billa appear without fanfare, underscoring how control and violence are constantly contested within Tihar. Critics compared Black Warrant to Paatal Lok and Kohrra with good reason. It’s one of those rare Indian series that trusts mood, detail and moral complexity more than constant plot fireworks.
This is one of the year’s most divisive films, and it deserves to sit here precisely because of that. Karan Singh Tyagi’s courtroom drama puts Akshay Kumar in the role of C Sankaran Nair, the lawyer who challenged the British over the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The film wants to be a shout of rage at the empire and a tribute to a forgotten figure, and at its best, it manages to be both. Critics who liked it pointed to the crackle of the trial scenes, the indignation in Kumar’s performance, and the rush of seeing imperial arrogance called out in a mainstream Hindi film. Others saw only bluster, historical shortcuts and a script that treats nuance as a distraction. The truth is somewhere in the middle. The film’s energy is undeniable, but so is its tendency to treat patriotism as a volume knob. It matters that Jallianwala Bagh and Nair reached audiences who may never touch a history book. It also matters that we can now discuss how that history is shaped on screen.
After the controversy around the first Dhadak softening Sairat’s brutal honesty, it was hard not to approach a sequel with suspicion. Shazia Iqbal quells that doubt in the opening minutes: the film begins with an honor killing and never lets you forget the stakes of caste, even when it is indulging in romance. Siddhant Chaturvedi’s Nilesh is a Dalit law student navigating a system that was never built for him. Triptii Dimri’s privileged Vidhi grows from infatuation into someone who can finally recognise his reality. The writing repeats certain beats, and the climax feels rushed, yet there is an undeniable sincerity in how the film stages humiliation, violence and small acts of resistance. It’s a sign that mainstream Hindi cinema is at least trying to look caste in the eye more directly.
Dominic Arun’s Malayalam superhero film is the sort of swing that Indian mainstream cinema has been threatening to take for years. A yakshi (a female spirit from Kerala’s folklore) bound to the night, a young man who falls in love with her, and a world built from Kerala’s folklore rather than imported capes and suits. The film’s political current runs just below the surface, visible in the way it threads caste and colonial memory into its origin story without stopping for lectures. Visually, it has fun with the form: frames are composed like panels, edits mimic page-turns, and action sequences feel native to this realm rather than some anonymous CGI backlot.
Varsha Bharath’s debut looks, at first glance, like the familiar Tamil trope of a Brahmin girl pushing against a strict family, sneaking off with boys, and running headlong into consequences. What makes Bad Girl stand out is how steadfastly it refuses to either punish or glorify its lead character, Ramya. It simply follows her, from adolescence into her late twenties, as she tries to understand what she wants. Anjali Sivaraman plays Ramya with a mix of bravado and ache. The film lets her make foolish choices without rushing in to chastize her. It’s clear-eyed about caste, how “liberal” families police daughters, and the way older men romanticize youthful rebellion while safeguarding their own reputations.
Aranya Sahay’s film is one of the year’s most understated political plots as well as one of its most original. Set in a data-labelling centre that feeds an AI system, it follows Nehma, a young Adivasi woman whose deep knowledge of forests and seasons now sits behind a screen, reduced to tagging images for a model that will eventually pretend to “understand” the world. Sonal Madhushankar anchors the film in a language that’s constantly shifting between corporate calls and home. The film resists two easy paths: it neither paints technology as a pure villain nor romanticizes indigenous knowledge as magic. Instead, it suggests that AI, like any child, learns whatever its teachers choose to feed it, and that leaving out the people closest to land and labour is not an accident.
Shahi Kabir’s Malayalam thriller takes place over a stormy Christmas Eve in Kolkata and feels like the cinematic equivalent of a long, unsettling night drive. Two cops, one young and haunted, one older and worn down, chase a case through rain-soaked streets, abandoned buildings and memories they are trying to outrun. Roshan Mathew and Dileesh Pothan play off each other with a wary intimacy that suggests years of shared compromises. The film square focus is on the weight that accumulates when your job is about administering force. It’s not a film that will play to every crowd, but for those tuned into this register of moral ambiguity, it lingers.
Aamir Khan’s return to the centre of a Hindi film that wants to teach you something about kindness carries heavy baggage from Taare Zameen Par (2007). This time, he plays a surly basketball coach named Gulshan who crashes his car while drunk and is forced by the court to train a team of neurodivergent young adults. The outline is borrowed from the Spanish film Campeones, but the cultural texture is very much local. The greatest strength here is the casting. The film works hard to ensure that its ten neurodivergent actors are not reduced to props in Gulshan’s redemption arc.
Telugu cinema’s recent interest in grounded social thrillers finds a strong addition in Ram Jagadeesh’s legal drama. A junior lawyer with more conscience than clout takes up the case of a 19-year-old engineering student who is arrested under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act ( POCSO) after crossing an influential relative of the girl he loves. Priyadarshi Pulikonda’s Surya Teja anchors the film as a lawyer who sees exactly how the law is bent. The courtroom drama unfolds through the tactical moves that expose class and caste bias, showing a system built to be misused. The film’s surprise box-office success in Telugu-speaking states further shows just how willing audiences are to back stories that marry genre and politics with care.
Anupam Kher’s return to direction could easily have slid into syrup. A teenage girl on the autism spectrum, her bond with a retired army officer grandfather, a dream to one day salute the flag in Siachen after her father dies in service — it reads like a recipe for manipulative sentiment. But the film mostly sidesteps that temptation. Shubhangi Dutt plays Tanvi without ornamental cues or underlining; you understand her through habits, flashes of stubborn resolve, and moments when the world overwhelms her. Kher plays the grandfather with unusual gentleness, slowly learning how to stand beside her rather than lead. The second half stumbles in pace, but its belief in quiet, everyday acceptance leaves a steady afterglow.
Nagesh Kukunoor’s series, based on the book Ninety Days, reconstructs the Rajiv Gandhi assassination and the subsequent CBI manhunt with the patience of a case file and the muscle of a thriller. Amit Sial’s D R Kaarthikeyan is a methodical investigator slowly tightening a net that keeps threatening to break. The use of archival footage and a clear timeline grounds the show in history rather than conspiracy. Reviewers praised its seriousness for good reason. It gives viewers a coherent, absorbing way to understand how institutions moved in those ninety days. In a streaming environment fond of fictionalized “inspired by” narratives, that choice to stay close to documented reality feels almost radical.
Where the more populist spy shows went wider and louder, Paatal Lok went further underground. Season 2 drags Hathiram Chaudhary from Delhi’s grimy corners into Nagaland’s even more complicated political landscape of beheadings, insurgent networks, business interests, and electoral games. Jaideep Ahlawat continues to play a man whose moral exhaustion never turns into melodrama. Ishwak Singh’s Ansari, now decorated and more confident, gives the show a second axis. The new season expands the canvas without losing the muck under people’s nails. It’s dense television that asks you to keep up, and there are moments where the ambition outpaces the clarity. But when it lands, it reminds you why season one set a benchmark in the first place.
Phulera has now lived in people’s heads long enough to feel less like a fictional village and more like that one place your friend keeps going back to for “a break.” Season 4 leans into that comfort. Instead of trying to rebuild the show from scratch, it circles local elections, an FIR that could derail Abhishek’s future, and a handful of dramatic village tales that could easily be anecdotes told over chai. The Jitendra Kumar–Neena Gupta–Raghubir Yadav core remains intact. Their scenes have that easy, overlapping cadence that makes you believe these people have been bickering for years. The Jitendra Kumar–Neena Gupta–Raghubir Yadav core remains intact, their scenes carrying the cadence of long-term familiarity. The writing shows some fatigue, with subplots that vanish quickly, but the Manju Devi–Kranti Devi election arc adds a much-needed spark.
Now in its fourth outing, Criminal Justice is increasingly about watching Pankaj Tripathi remodel Madhav Mishra in small, precise ways. This time, he lands between a celebrated surgeon, a dead nurse, a media circus and a family intent on hiding its fractures. True to form, the season finds the human seam beneath procedural beats. Mishra’s mix of underdog charm and sharp legal instinct stays intact. Zeeshan Ayyub’s Dr Raj Nagpal never becomes heroic or despicable, just recognisably flawed. At eight episodes, the season moves briskly enough that very few detours feel indulgent. You can sense the writers are aware of how crowded the legal-thriller space has become, and go the extra mile to keep the case grounded.
The women’s hostel horror story is such a rich Indian subgenre that it’s surprising we don’t see it more often. Khauf plants itself in a Delhi hostel room with a violent past and lets the dread seep in slowly. Madhu, played by Monika Panwar, arrives with her own baggage, and the show keeps blurring the line between what is supernatural and what comes from bruises you cannot see. Panwar is the big reason the series works when it does. She communicates fear as something that lodges in the body: a tightening jaw, a refusal to meet a gaze, a laugh that lands half a second late. Along with the haunting, there are fraught friendships, old traumas, and a final pivot that insists the real horror is human violence. The series doesn’t fully solve its own puzzle, but it gives the Hindi streaming space one of its more interesting horror attempts in years.
If you grew up on overwrought TV thrillers that treated mythology like wallpaper, this Netflix series feels like a conscious attempt to do it differently. Set in a fictional Uttar Pradesh town, Mandala Murders follows a CBI officer and a disgraced local cop tracking ritualistic killings tied to an ancient order called the Mandala. The show’s strongest pull is sensory detail. It looks and sounds like it believes in its own mythology, with carefully built symbols, dual timelines flowing between the 1950s and the present, and a colour palette steeped in slow dread. Vaani Kapoor’s Rea Thomas is steely, while Vaibhav Raj Gupta brings a bruised urgency. The plot can feel overstuffed, but as a mythology-meets-crime experiment, it’s genuinely intriguing.
Neeraj Pandey’s espionage series returns with cyberwarfare as its new toy. Himmat Singh and his team are now racing against coordinated attacks on India’s digital backbone, from UPI to national databases, with a globe-trotting canvas that hops through European capitals. Kay Kay Menon remains the franchise’s gravitational pull, giving Himmat that particular mix of wry humour and bone-deep fatigue that makes him more than a stock “handler.” Tahir Raj Bhasin’s antagonist brings the right amount of charm and menace. It’s engrossing in the moment, even if its plot dissolves a little too soon after the credits roll.
The Family Man’s latest chapter uproots Srikant Tiwari from familiar urban settings and drops him into Nagaland, where insurgency, a peace initiative and global arms networks intersect. The show continues to juggle its signature domestic humor with high-stakes espionage. Manoj Bajpayee remains the franchise’s biggest asset, moving from deadpan one-liners at therapy to morally complicated choices in the field without ever feeling like two different people. The Nagaland setting opens up new visual and political terrain, and the addition of actors like Jaideep Ahlawat to the cast injects fresh energy. For longtime fans, Season 3 delivered more of what they love: an everyman spy navigating problems at home and in the national security apparatus with equal levels of panic and ingenuity.
In The Bads of Bollywood, Aryan Khan turns the Hindi film industry into both subject and stage. Stars and industry figures play caricaturized versions of themselves in a satirical look at gossip, scandals and the chaotic ecosystem that keeps Bollywood buzzing. The central pleasure for many viewers was seeing big names lean into self-mockery, spoofing everything from blind items to “gym pap” culture and the never-ending nepotism debate. The show works best in these moments of self-awareness, where insiders allow the audience to be in on the joke. As a debut, it establishes Aryan Khan as someone interested in both celebrating and teasing the world he grew up in, hinting at sharper jibes to come.
The Royals fulfil a very specific fantasy: the idea of stepping into a present-day Rajasthani palace where old titles and new start-ups coexist. Ishaan Khatter’s Prince Aviraaj and Bhumi Pednekar’s entrepreneur Sophia come from different worlds, and the series tracks what happens when those worlds are forced to share space. The show leans into opulent visuals with sweeping shots of forts, courtyards, jewellery and costumes that recall a more classical Bollywood royalty, while still making room for laptops and start-up pitches. Ishaan and Bhumi bring sincerity to their roles, and veterans like Sakshi Tanwar and Zeenat Aman add gravitas and charm. For viewers in the mood for escapist drama with a modern twist on royal-romance tropes, The Royals is an easygoing, glossy watch.
Abishan Jeevinth’s Tourist Family introduces Tamil audiences to a Sri Lankan Tamil couple starting their lives anew in Tamil Nadu after the 2022 economic crisis. Pandian and Jothi, played by Sasikumar and Simran, bring with them memories, fears and a determination to rebuild. The film uses humour and warmth to balance the heavier themes of displacement and belonging. Village settings, local festivals and everyday interactions help ground the refugee experience in recognisable Tamil cultural contexts. Simran and Sasikumar share a lovely, understated chemistry that makes their small victories and setbacks feel personal. Tourist Family ultimately works as a heartfelt story about resilience, community and the second chances that come with migration.
Search: The Naina Murder Case is built around the compelling idea of a high-profile serial-murder investigation seen through the eyes of a seasoned detective played by Konkona Sen Sharma. Set in a world saturated with social media and influencer culture, the series taps into very current anxieties around visibility and danger. Konkona, as always, gives her character a quietly authoritative presence. Even small scenes gain weight when she is on screen, and her reading of clues and suspects draws viewers into the procedural rhythm. The show’s visual language leans into screens, notifications and digital traces, reflecting the way contemporary investigations unfold. For audiences drawn to moody, character-led crime dramas with a strong central performance, Search offered a dark, contemporary mystery to dive into.
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