The most memorable moments in Indian cinema in 2025

Origin: Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra

Lokah is far and away the best commercial film of the year, yet little that it does is blazingly new. Instead, it excels as precisely calibrated popular filmmaking that respects its audience’s time and intelligence. Director Dominic Arun and star Kalyani Priyadarshan fuse superhero movie dynamics with yakshi myths to offer an alternative vision: sleek, stirring and feminist.

Recent franchise films have struggled to contain origin stories, often stretching them over half or more of the running time. Lokah dispenses with its heroine’s past in 15 crisp minutes. First, young Neeli (Durga C. Vinod) is bitten by a bat. Then, as she and her tribe are persecuted by the king’s soldiers for praying at a temple, a soldier runs a spear through her. But instead of dying, she gets up, bares her new fangs and rips through the garrison in a frenzied, feral action sequence. A time-hopping animated passage brings the story up to date. This is intercut with a grown Neeli (Kalyani) in the present day, exacting her own bloody retribution. It’s thrilling, but also canny storytelling, the tragic origin of Neeli/Chandra’s powers lending the film an ache that’s ever-present in Kalyani’s melancholic performance. (JioHotstar)

Saving grace: Stolen

The most talked-about treatment of mob violence in a film this year is the 20 minutes of L2: Empuraan that show the 2002 Gujarat riots (and which earned the film re-censorship while still in theatres). Karan Tejpal’s Stolen, from 2023 but released on streaming this year, is a smaller-scale but equally discomfiting look at how rumour can spiral into vigilante revenge. Towards the end of the film, Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee), mistaken for a baby-snatcher, is set upon by a mob inflamed by WhatsApp hearsay. In another part of the village, his brother, Raman (Shubham Vardhan), badly injured, is chanced upon by three teens. It looks like his end as the scene ominously cuts… until he’s brought out on a stretcher, alive, the boys looking on.

“Sometimes you have to take a stand,” Raman tells his brother earlier in the film . For all its bleakness, Stolen believes in the possibility of individual courage at the cost of personal safety. Raman takes a vital early stand, so does a local cop, eventually even cynical Gautam. And there’s the three boys (and likely other locals), whose quiet saving of Raman, between scenes and unacknowledged, might be the bravest act in the film. (Amazon Prime)

Zoom in: Saiyaara

You can sense what’s coming, but that doesn’t make it any less exhilarating. Singer Krish (Ahaan Panday) has finally hit the big time. Yet he’s moodier than ever. His girlfriend, Vaani (Aneet Padda), diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a year earlier, has vanished. He’s given up hope of finding her, and is living a life of miserable stardom. On the eve of his biggest gig, at Wembley stadium, the band excitedly does a soundcheck—all except Krish, who sits despondent in the stands. A giant screen on the pitch plays a compilation of fan-sourced reels. Krish’s manager notices something in one of these, asks the technician to pause and zoom in on a girl sitting in a crowd. Her face is hidden except for her eyes, but it’s unmistakably Vaani. Krish gets up and runs all the way to the stage. The final breathtaking shot is of him on his knees, dwarfed by the screen that’s entirely taken up by Vaani’s eyes.

Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara, an unheralded film with two debutant leads, became a surprise hit because of moments like this, uncomplicated, sweeping, done with utter conviction. At its best, it felt like a return to Bollywood’s strengths—yearning, romantic gloom, musical melodrama—areas underserved in recent years in the mad race to develop action franchises. (Netflix)

Being and not-being: Chaar Phool Hain Aur Duniya Hai

Achal Mishra has been carving out a small corner of cinema all his own. His first two films, Gamak Ghar (2019) and Dhuin (2022), set in his hometown of Darbhanga, were modest but distinctive, fictions that hewed close to non-fiction and autofiction. His documentary Chaar Phool Hain Aur Duniya Hai, featuring Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla, who passed away this week, was shot over two afternoons at the latter’s home in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. Framed in Mishra’s favoured 4:3, it’s a wistful, sun-dappled portrait of an artist in his natural habitat.

Mishra’s film is so intimate that the smallest events register. Early on, as Shukla is speaking, a small twig flies and lodges in his white hair. A hand from offscreen appears and removes it. I assumed this was Mishra, but it turns out to be actor and writer Manav Kaul, who takes on the task of interviewer. There’s an echo of this in the film’s last sequence. Shukla is sitting in the garden, and Kaul, mic'd up, stands over him, soothing his hair into place. Shukla’s son then hands him the poem he’ll read at the film’s close: In my being, I’m becoming a photo, so that somehow, I leave behind my not-being, in a photo… (MUBI, YouTube)

Confrontation: Dhadak 2

In remaking Pariyerum Perumal (2018), Mari Selvaraj’s acclaimed film about caste oppression in higher education, Shazia Iqbal had her work cut out. Though it borrows heavily from the Tamil original, Dhadak 2 feels vivid and urgent in its own right. Iqbal, making her feature debut, shows a talent for imbuing scenes with a galvanising intensity. Take, for instance, when law student Vidhi (Triptii Dimri) confronts Neelesh (Siddhant Chaturvedi) after he stops attending class and talking to her (she doesn’t know he was beaten and humiliated by her relatives for daring to get close to an upper-caste girl).

When Vidhi turns up his door, Neelesh dodges her inquiries, then unloads his frustrations. Iqbal stages their conversation dynamically, moving them along the narrow lanes of the slum. Everything works in concert: Sylvester Fonseca’s agile camera; the colourful clotheslines a contrast to the cool blue-shaded walls; the anguish of Dimri and Chaturvedi; the way she keeps trying to enter his space and he keeps withdrawing. It’s an example of how much electricity Iqbal can generate from a simple setup. (Netflix)

Marriage story: Sabar Bonda

Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) and his mother, Suman (Jayshri Jagtap), have been staying at his ancestral village in the wake of his father’s death. They make a trip one day to visit her father in a nearby village. The old man launches into a story about how Anand’s father, an educated city boy, was to actually wed Suman’s younger sister, yet insisted on marrying illiterate Suman instead. This was a kindness—he learnt that her prospects would be affected if the younger sister married first.

Throughout Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda, we see Suman determined to pass on this kindness to her gay son. She shields him from the extended family’s inquiries about marriage and hints about his sexuality. We learn that Anand came out to his parents, that his father was supportive. Now his mother tells him, as he contemplates a future in Mumbai with his khaas mitr (special friend) from the village: “[Your father] was rather happy you told us the truth. He thought I wouldn’t understand, so he would explain things to me. But I already knew about you.”

Coloured lines: Follower

So much of the Indian social media experience is dealing with trolls—paid trolls, if you tend to talk about politics or cinema (if you talk about both you need to have a thick skin, as the backlash to Dhurandhar reviews showed). Harshad Nalawade’s Follower is fascinating for anyone who’s ever wondered, who are these accounts with so much hate? Raghu (Raghu Prakash) is a disaffected young Marathi man in Belgaum. With a dead-end job, a dependent mother and a growing anger towards his circumstances, he drifts towards hardline groups protesting the mistreatment of Marathi-speakers in the city.

Language is the flashpoint in Follower; though the official language of Belgaum is Kannada, the city has almost as many Marathi speakers. Raghu’s slide towards radicalization is sealed by two incidents at the gift store he runs. The first is by a group of Marathi activists who warn him to shut shop and observe a strike. This is followed by a group of Kannada-speaking men ordering him to keep it open. One of them stays back to browse greeting cards, getting Raghu to translate from English to Kannada. Throughout the film, Nalawade keeps Marathi and English subtitles in white and Kannada in yellow, something viewers might not even notice because scenes either have one or the other. In this scene though, as Raghu gets angrier, he switches from Kannada to Marathi until white and yellow are yelling at each other.

The kindest cut: Bad Girl

At several points in Bad Girl, director Varsha Bharath and editor Radha Sridhar use quick, almost distracted cutting. This isn’t uncommon in Tamil cinema, but Bharath uses this technique in a unique way, not as a stylistic device but as an extension of her heroine’s impulsive energy, The leaping cuts serve to illustrate a mind perpetually dissatisfied with the present and racing ahead to an imagined happy future.

The cutting is calmer as protagonist Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman) finds some balance in her 30s, but every now and then there’s a flurry. One evocative cascade comes late in the film, when Ramya, her ex, Irfan (Teejay Arunasalam), and his partner look for her runaway cat. “You never, ever made me feel abandoned,” Ramya tells him in the present, as Bharath flashes back to when they were a couple. It’s late, he offers to drop her home. In the past, Ramya would’ve instinctively made a messy decision. Instead, she tells him to go, that she’ll be fine. There are four quick shots: Ramya asking “Promise?” back when they were dating, Irfan asking the same in the present, him replying “Promise” in the past and her in the present. It feels like hard-won closure. (JioHotstar)

Reeling: Alappuzha Gymkhana

At their first boxing tournament, the Alappuzha gang is getting crushed. The latest to fall is the group’s de facto leader, Jojo (Naslen). As he walks away dejected, he sees that the next bout is Natasha (Anagha Maya Ravi), from the Alappuzha women’s team, on whom he has a raging crush. And so he hangs around to see her fight, convincing his teammates to do the same.

Alappuzha Gymkhana is centered on a ragtag all-male group. But as with Thallumaala (2022), Khalid Rahman’s previous film, the women are self-possessed and smart while the men are overgrown children. Natasha puts on a masterclass, dancing lightly around her opponent with a smile on her face before knocking her out. The bout is cut to the rhythm of the exuberant ‘Panjara Punch’, whose lyrics turn combat into a metaphor for romance (“you ducked, you weaved, and left me reeling”).

At a time when much of Indian cinema is dedicated to gym bro CGI action, Alappuzha Gymkhana causally hands its male hero a loss and a supporting female player a showcase. It’s a subversion typical of Rahman, one of the deftest filmmakers working today. (SonyLiv)

Destruction derby: Kantara: A Legend—Chapter 1

I’m probably in the minority for preferring Rishab Shetty’s second Kantara film to the first. While Chapter 1 is less intense and hallucinatory than 2022’s Kantara, the new film expands the franchise’s daiva legend to tell a more expansive story set in the Kadamba dynasty. It plays at times like a doofus Ponniyin Selvan, creating a lively 4th century port city with global trade and complex subdivisions.

Shetty, as star and director, has honed his timing—especially his comic timing— this time round. There's an extended set piece where villager Berme (Shetty) and his gang infiltrate the capital of the Bangra kingdom disguised as soldiers. When their cover is inevitably blown, their retreat, atop a giant chariot, becomes a joyous destruction derby. There’s a Rajamouli-like grandeur to Shetty’s action here, but I was reminded even more of a childhood favourite: Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix comics, with their amiable madness and tales of a village taking on an empire. (Amazon Prime)

Seeing red: Dhurandhar

The irony of Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar is that it’s anti-Pakistan propaganda that derives its energy from its vision of Karachi as a gangster’s paradise and the swagger of its Pakistani characters, especially Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait. India and Indians are largely absent—which means Dhar must do something dramatic to make them central to the narrative. He achieves this with the 26/11 sequence, cross-cutting between footage of the attacks and celebrations in Karachi by a motley group of ISI heads, politicians and gangsters. There’s also an unexpected flourish: transcript and audio of conversations between terrorists and their handlers during the attacks over a dramatic red screen.

Dhurandhar’s rabid fandom has opposed the film’s characterisation as propaganda. They ought to embrace it. This is top-shelf propaganda, surprising, methodical, enraging. Dhar is a smart filmmaker, and you have to join the dots to see more insidious patterns, from a remark about cowardly Hindus to another about slaughterhouses in UP to repeated cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ from the 26/11 watch party. In Dhar’s pitiless vision, 26/11 is an incident to be milked like Uri and Pulwama, and Pakistan a lawless playground to be blown up.

Calm like a bomb: Homebound

Much of Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound is about what happens to the characters, or what they say. Still, one of the sharpest moments is a relatively silent one. Childhood buddies Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) are working at a textile mill in Surat when covid hits and the government orders a 21-day lockdown. Ghaywan uses sound to show the surreal switch that happened on 25 March 2020: panic in the streets on the night of the announcement, ghost towns the next morning. The audio design is suddenly clear of everything but the smallest sounds—birds flapping, water drops falling, wind moving through abandoned workplaces. And the first human voice is a pointedly political choice: policemen hectoring confused labourers and hitting them with laathis. (Netflix)