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What is the story about?
As Dhurandhar continues its bloody rampage at the box office, raking in an unprecedented ₹1,000 crore within 21 days of release, it is easy to forget the quieter films that made 2025 a memorable year for Hindi cinema.
The year had some rousing successes such as Chhaava and Saiyaara but there were also big misses with mammoth franchise films tanking at the ticket window without a trace. However, despite the rising uncertainty and the cacophony, a few films, undeterred by scale or box office, had something worthwhile to say about the human condition and its kaleidoscopic complexities.
Each of the movies mentioned here dared to tap into issues and emotions too layered and intimate to be slotted into a genre. In the era of ambient viewing, they demand absolute and undivided attention. They will make you think, question and see the world with its inherent prejudices and fissures in a different light. If you haven’t watched them already, make sure you do as 2025 draws to a close.
Stolen (Prime Video)
A terrific showcase for Abhishek Banerjee’s uncontainable talent, it is the opposite of a comfort watch.
Stolen is scary, mostly because of how quotidian its story and the violence it is enveloped in is. Inspired by true events, it’s a punch in the gut, the way Anushka Sharma’s NH10 (2015) was.
Directed by Karan Tejpal, the edge-of-the-seat survival thriller puts in the forefront the simmering tension arising from India’s ticking-bomb inequality that has served as the foundation of some of the most cutting, incisive stories told in recent years.
At 94 minutes, the film grabs you by the throat, making sure you barely breathe. Through two brothers embroiled in the frantic search for a missing baby, Stolen highlights a smattering of primitive problems that continue to plague modern India—wildfire-like spread of misinformation via WhatsApp, illegal surrogacy, child trafficking, mob frenzy and lynching.
Homebound (Netflix)
The story of two childhood friends, impoverished and marginalised because of their identity and the resultant casual cruelty, Homebound is Neeraj Ghaywan’s sophomore feature-length directorial, 10 years after his glorious debut Masaan.
It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year to a resounding nine-minute standing ovation and is now representing India at the elusive Oscars. Despite its tense, thorny themes, at no point does the film throb with raw rage. Instead, it uses silence to choke. Whether it be the helplessness, the injustice, or the suffocation that stems from hitting one dead end after another, Homebound uses restraint as its language to communicate emotions as volcanic as turmoil, ambition, envy and abject dejection.
Inspired by Basharat Peer’s 2020 New York Times essay that recounted the halting grief of two friends forced to walk from Surat to their Uttar Pradesh village about a thousand kilometres away after the ill-conceived first lockdown was announced at the advent of the coronavirus outbreak, the film zooms in on the gut-wrenching apathy that shrouded the migrant crisis.
Homebound is so intricately, inextricably mired in the marginalised disenfranchisement of its protagonists in the first half that you don’t see the migrant crisis coming. It creeps up on you and the two boys (played with remarkable restraint by Ishaan Khatter and Vishal Jethwa) out of nowhere and hits like a million bricks.
The Mehta Boys (Prime Video)
Boman Irani’s directorial debut, The Mehta Boys is a minutely observed, superbly performed film. It follows Amay (Avinash Tiwary), a young architect in Mumbai struggling to find his voice and footing in a city that’s constantly shifting as he’s forced to spend a few days with his 71-year-old father Shiv (Irani), with whom he has a prickly, uncomfortable equation.
Apart from the acting performances, the other major takeaway from the film is its attention to detail. It’s the little things that make The Mehta Boys sing. It is peppered with several quiet, lovely moments that add to it weight, depth, and a lot of heart.
Superboys of Malegaon (Prime Video)
Written by Varun Grover, Reema Kagti’s film is inspired by Faiza Ahmad Khan’s globe-trotting 2012 documentary Supermen of Malegaon that focused on Malegaon’s makeshift movie industry and its epicenter Nasir Shaikh. Fueled by his love for cinema and with the support of his friends, he made hyperlocal parodies of blockbusters such as Sholay, Shaan, and Superman in the 1990s and 2000s.
Superboys of Malegaon captures their movie adventures between 1997 and 2011. Cinephilia is so deeply embedded in the film that it informs every action, each frame, all dialogue and conflicts. At 131 minutes, it’s a film about crazies. Remember Emma Stone’s Audition (The Fools Who Dream) song from Damien Chazelle’s 2016 film La La Land? Superboys of Malegaon is its cinematic version.
A charming cocktail of indie and mainstream that cares to acknowledge margins but not enough to push them, the film neatly fits into the Excel and Tiger Baby template. Bathed in gorgeous, diffused light and elevated by standout performances, it throws at you plenty to ponder over.
In a decade marked by bloated, jingoistic spectacles, it dares to place at its centre working-class muslims. Brimming with iridescent moments of emotional authenticity, Superboys of Malegaon also deftly dabbles with existential dilemmas such as art vs commerce and art vs artist.
The year had some rousing successes such as Chhaava and Saiyaara but there were also big misses with mammoth franchise films tanking at the ticket window without a trace. However, despite the rising uncertainty and the cacophony, a few films, undeterred by scale or box office, had something worthwhile to say about the human condition and its kaleidoscopic complexities.
Each of the movies mentioned here dared to tap into issues and emotions too layered and intimate to be slotted into a genre. In the era of ambient viewing, they demand absolute and undivided attention. They will make you think, question and see the world with its inherent prejudices and fissures in a different light. If you haven’t watched them already, make sure you do as 2025 draws to a close.
Stolen (Prime Video)
A terrific showcase for Abhishek Banerjee’s uncontainable talent, it is the opposite of a comfort watch.
Directed by Karan Tejpal, the edge-of-the-seat survival thriller puts in the forefront the simmering tension arising from India’s ticking-bomb inequality that has served as the foundation of some of the most cutting, incisive stories told in recent years.
At 94 minutes, the film grabs you by the throat, making sure you barely breathe. Through two brothers embroiled in the frantic search for a missing baby, Stolen highlights a smattering of primitive problems that continue to plague modern India—wildfire-like spread of misinformation via WhatsApp, illegal surrogacy, child trafficking, mob frenzy and lynching.
Homebound (Netflix)
The story of two childhood friends, impoverished and marginalised because of their identity and the resultant casual cruelty, Homebound is Neeraj Ghaywan’s sophomore feature-length directorial, 10 years after his glorious debut Masaan.
It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year to a resounding nine-minute standing ovation and is now representing India at the elusive Oscars. Despite its tense, thorny themes, at no point does the film throb with raw rage. Instead, it uses silence to choke. Whether it be the helplessness, the injustice, or the suffocation that stems from hitting one dead end after another, Homebound uses restraint as its language to communicate emotions as volcanic as turmoil, ambition, envy and abject dejection.
Inspired by Basharat Peer’s 2020 New York Times essay that recounted the halting grief of two friends forced to walk from Surat to their Uttar Pradesh village about a thousand kilometres away after the ill-conceived first lockdown was announced at the advent of the coronavirus outbreak, the film zooms in on the gut-wrenching apathy that shrouded the migrant crisis.
Homebound is so intricately, inextricably mired in the marginalised disenfranchisement of its protagonists in the first half that you don’t see the migrant crisis coming. It creeps up on you and the two boys (played with remarkable restraint by Ishaan Khatter and Vishal Jethwa) out of nowhere and hits like a million bricks.
The Mehta Boys (Prime Video)
Boman Irani’s directorial debut, The Mehta Boys is a minutely observed, superbly performed film. It follows Amay (Avinash Tiwary), a young architect in Mumbai struggling to find his voice and footing in a city that’s constantly shifting as he’s forced to spend a few days with his 71-year-old father Shiv (Irani), with whom he has a prickly, uncomfortable equation.
Apart from the acting performances, the other major takeaway from the film is its attention to detail. It’s the little things that make The Mehta Boys sing. It is peppered with several quiet, lovely moments that add to it weight, depth, and a lot of heart.
Superboys of Malegaon (Prime Video)
Written by Varun Grover, Reema Kagti’s film is inspired by Faiza Ahmad Khan’s globe-trotting 2012 documentary Supermen of Malegaon that focused on Malegaon’s makeshift movie industry and its epicenter Nasir Shaikh. Fueled by his love for cinema and with the support of his friends, he made hyperlocal parodies of blockbusters such as Sholay, Shaan, and Superman in the 1990s and 2000s.
Superboys of Malegaon captures their movie adventures between 1997 and 2011. Cinephilia is so deeply embedded in the film that it informs every action, each frame, all dialogue and conflicts. At 131 minutes, it’s a film about crazies. Remember Emma Stone’s Audition (The Fools Who Dream) song from Damien Chazelle’s 2016 film La La Land? Superboys of Malegaon is its cinematic version.
A charming cocktail of indie and mainstream that cares to acknowledge margins but not enough to push them, the film neatly fits into the Excel and Tiger Baby template. Bathed in gorgeous, diffused light and elevated by standout performances, it throws at you plenty to ponder over.
In a decade marked by bloated, jingoistic spectacles, it dares to place at its centre working-class muslims. Brimming with iridescent moments of emotional authenticity, Superboys of Malegaon also deftly dabbles with existential dilemmas such as art vs commerce and art vs artist.
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