The stories that spoke to our humanity, challenged prejudices and stoked ambition
IMDb
As the year draws to a close, the world of Bollywood cinema has mesmerized viewers with a unique blend of spectacle, emotion, and storytelling. Here are our top picks, ranked!
Director Atlee’s Jawan, starring Shah Rukh Khan, Nayanthara, and Vijay Sethupathi, is an action-wala thriller that, on the face of it, seems no different from other hyper-macho Tamil films where SUVs go flying in the air and gore is just red residue left behind after the hero does a tandav with guns and knives.
Even the film’s ‘honest cop goes vigilante-rogue’ to fix some political and personal wrongs traces its lineage to Amitabh Bachchan’s 1988 Shahenshah and beyond.
Yet Jawan is a landmark film for at least three reasons: One, it reiterated and consolidated Khan’s box-office power. Two, it showcased what incredible swag SRK has when he plays a no-hold-barred, cigar-puffing senior citizen. Three, Jawan gave us a collective moment of sweet revenge with a simple dialogue that was so sharp that even a certain Wankhede’s wife was forced to say, “Main inke kapde Surf se dhoti hoon”.
I can watch Jawan over and over in anticipation of that seeti-maro, taali-bajao dialogue that feels like justice has been served, shaken, and stirred.
It takes very special skills and a certain khulla-dulla joie de vivre to pull off what Karan Johar and Ranveer Singh did in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani: Turning cringe into a class act.
The film’s story is simple and about a shaadi. Rocky (Ranveer Singh), a rich Punjabi boy, gets soft-soft feelings when he meets gori-chitti Bengali girl, Rani (Alia Bhatt). They fall in love and the rest of the film is about the Punjabi boy and the Bengali girl trying to convince their prospective in-laws to chill a bit on protecting their izzat by doing doosre ki besti.
In this clash of wine-sipping, poetry-reciting bhadralok, and ladoo-selling millionaires, Johar uses jokes, laughter, tension, and tears to challenge gender prejudices and cultural chauvinism. The film questions patriarchal bade-buzurg who control the lives of their children not out of love but because they love exercising their power, and in a dance sequence reminiscent of Sanjay Leela Bhansali, it shatters a taboo so memorably.
Only Karan Johar could have made a movie so blingy, so melodramatic, and yet so sublime.
Plotted as a political thriller, writer-director Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah (Rumour) begins with an election campaign in Rajasthan where Vikram Singh (Sumeet Vyas) is delivering a hate speech. Things go wrong quickly, videos go viral, and as politicians try to control the damage by offering their own for sacrifice, Rahab (Nawazuddin Siddique) and Nivedita Singh (Bhumi Pednekar) are thrown into this vortex of hate and violence.
Afwaah‘s take-off point is the pursuit of power with the politics of hate. Still, as it winds its way through mohallas and narrow lanes, where people keep joining in and the film has to make brief detours, it illuminates many realities. It shatters many myths, including any about the Muslim monolith.
The film’s plotting is so taut and fabulous that each new character and tangent adds another, new layer of social and political commentary—fromhow police aren’t just complicit but are often an accomplice to what the trinity of power, patriarchy, and Hindutva means for women and minorities.
The film’s last sequence is again a searing comment on what we, the people of India, have become.
Director Nandita Das’ Zwigato, which she has co-written with Samir Patil, trains its lens on people who are all around us, but whom we don’t see at all.
Starring Kapil Sharma and Shahana Goswami, Zwigato tells the story of rising unemployment and the growing gig economy through Manas, his wife Pratima, their two school-going children, and his bedridden mother.
Manas used to work as a manager at a watch factory but had to join Zwigato as a food delivery man. In the day he drives around delivering food packets and boxes of pizzas, and at night he dreams of submitting a form at the employment exchange.
Zwigato is set in a modern, digitized India into which old India is slowly moving in. It’s a dystopia of tall glass buildings with guards and gates, where entries are registered and monitored on CCTV, where old class and caste divides are entrenched in new ways.
The film has heartfelt performances by Kapil Sharma and Shahana Goswami who humanize the “delivery guy” and the “malish-waali”. But Zwigato really is Das’ film, which makes us see those people who bring us our food and clean the malls and their loos. And how their lives and livelihoods are tied to a few seconds of decency and humanity from us.
Usually, societies, cultures, and people begin to fantasize about individual courage and triumph when their faith in institutions and the system is shaken. And cinema, especially Indian commercial films, always reflects what people are feeling.
Director Apoorv Singh Karki’s film, set in that sort of mood, tells the real-life story of PC Solanki, an advocate in Jodhpur who fought a court battle against Asaram Bapu to get justice for a minor that the self-styled guru had raped.
Witnesses are killed and attacked, including in court premises. Threats are issued routinely, and yet the scooter-riding lawyer stands his ground against some of the highest-paid bigwigs of the legal world — Ram Jethmalani, Salman Khurshid, and Subramanian Swamy — to get justice for the girl and her family.
In a country where rape conviction stands at 27.8 percent, that’s a fete worth celebrating. But Bajpayee’s heart-warming performance and his character’s dogged faith in justice do more. He made me believe that in the fight for justice kabhi-kabhi, sirf ek bandaa hi kaafi hai.
Set in a predominantly Indian neighborhood in London, director Pushan Kripalani’s Goldfish, which stars Deepti Naval and Kalki Koechlin, is about imperfect mothers and struggling daughters, about remembering and loss, about love and resentment.
Anamika (Kalki Koechlin) returns home only for a few days with a task at hand – she has to put away her mother, Sadhana (Deepti Naval), who is suffering from dementia, in a care home.
They talk, but sometimes even their casual comments to each other fall whiplashes, hinting at a past that has faded in the mother’s memory, but lives in the daughter’s life like a constantly troubling companion.
Sadhana is getting worse, and Anamika, who remembers it all in excruciating detail, would like some answers, and explanations. They argue, and fight, using their vulnerability sometimes as a weapon till they begin to see the other a little bit.
Kalki Koechlin is excellent in Goldfish. But it’s Deepti Naval’s performance that comes as close as a performance can to perfection. There were several moments in the film when I really felt that Naval was not well. Bravo!
One of the most identity-shaping series for my generation was Doordarshan’s Udaan (1989). Kavita Chaudhary, better known then as Surf’s Lalitaji, drew inspiration for the series from the real-life story of her sister. She wrote and directed the series, as well as played the main character of Kalyani Singh, an IPS officer, in it.
Writer-director Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 12th Fail reignites that aspiration laced with idealism which, even today, fuels young men and women for whom the only way to transcend their reality, to move from the margins to the mainstream, to acquire a voice and some power is by clearing the civil services exam.
The film, based on Anurag Pathak’s book about Manoj Kumar Sharma, a real-life IPS officer, follows a boy from a poor family in Bihar who flunks his 12th-class exams but is determined to crack the civils.
Manoj (Vikrant Massey) moves to Gwalior where he struggles to send money back home by working in a library, then an atte ki chakki, while trying to prepare for the prelims and mains.
12th Fail has two stunning, stand-out performances. One is by Vikrant Massey who humanizes his character with desperation, dreams, and determination. The other is by Vidhu Vinod Chopra whose quietly dazzling storytelling uses the constant cackle of real life to sometimes drown out a young man’s ambition, and sometimes he dials it down to heigten the power of impossible dreams.
Most films whose plots are built around women’s distress proceed in predictable ways. In some, a man arrives to save the day and the damsel in distress, in others the woman rises from ashes to exact revenge.
Director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Apurva is a genre film, much like Coralie Fargeat’s 2017 French film, Revenge, but with serious feminist credentials and exceptional performances.
In Chambal, where a gang of dacoits — Jugnu (Rajpal Yadav), Sukha (Abhishek Banerjee), Balli (Sumit Gulati), and Chhote (Aaditya Gupta) — stalks the highway for cash, jewelry, and a bit of mayhem, Apurva (Tara Sutaria) is traveling in a bus to surprise her boyfriend.
Before she is dragged out of the bus, we witness scenes of such insane violence that it sends chills down my fairly immune-to-gore spine.
In between all the shooting and killing that follows, there are flashbacks that establish Bhat’s gender politics and deliver do thappad to patriarchy and patriarchal films.
We meet Apurva and her family who go to meet a prospective groom. Questions are asked of the boy, not the girl.
We also meet the gang in a quiet moment when they are watching a film. Sukha looks up longingly at the sad, bruised, humiliated woman on the screen and says, ‘That’s the kind of woman I want’. It’s a scene from Kabir Singh.
The way Bhat’s film unfolds after that, it seems to say that every Kabir Singh must beget an Apurva.
Writer-director Amit Rai’s OMG 2 is about religion and sex, specifically about Hindus and sanatan dharam being more progressive and open about sex before coy, gora colonizers turned sex into gandi baat.
The film’s story is about a young victim of this puritanical attitude, and his two saviors.
Vivek (Aarush Varma), the son of Kanti Sharan Mudgal (Pankaj Tripathi), is bullied in school, and when he seeks some sane counsel about his manhood, he is turned away to do his own thing in the bathroom. But then, a clip of him doing gandi baat goes viral and he is thrown out of the school.
Enter Akshay Kumar, who could be Lord Shiva himself or Mahakaal’s messenger. His intervention and cryptic one-liners propel Kanti, a devout Shiv bhakt, to sue the school.
What follows is a courtroom drama between the lovely, English-speaking advocate Kamini Maheshwari (Yami Gautam Dhar) and shudh-Hindi spouting Kanti Sharan in front of judge Purushottam Nagar (Pavan Malhotra).
A lot of OMG 2’s dialogues are about Hindu religious exceptionalism, but it uses this to argue against Victorian puritanical morality, even suggesting that the silence and shame that surrounds sex is damaging our sons, and not allowing girls to talk about sexual abuse. And at one point, when a Shivling is placed in a Dalit house, next to a sketch of Baba Saheb Ambedkar, the film is sharply subversive.
OMG 2 has some lovely performances, but its superpower is Lord Shiv, played with bohemian abandon by Akshay Kumar. At a time when all Hindu gods are shown as angry, OMG 2’s Lord Shiva has yoga-guru dreadlocks, wears cool dhoti pants, and a lovely, warm smile.
There’s something about R. Balki’s films that feels so artificial, so contrived that I have always found it hard to connect with them even when I have wanted to.
Except Paa, and now Ghoomer (Spinner).
Ghoomer is a story about a very talented, driven, and temperamental young cricketer, Anina (Saiyami Kher), who is selected and is all set to bat for India when she loses her right hand in an accident.
It’s like a death sentence for a woman whose only goal in life was to play cricket.
Enter Paddy (Abhishek Bachchan), a man who bowled for India just once, and holds a grudge against the world for not giving him a second chance.
He arrives to mock and goad Anina to take a second chance.
There’s really a meanness in Paddy as he trains Anina to bowl. But Paddy’s disdain is met with Anina’s unbelievable grit and talent who learns to live and bowl with her left hand.
Saiyami Kher, who plays cricket in real life, is excellent. Abhishek Bachchan as the drunk, sulking badtameez coach is fantastic. And Balki’s Ghoomer, despite its fanciful story, is believable, and inspiring and makes you feel that whatever you want to achieve, you can.
What better note to begin 2024 than this!
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