20 – Gully Boy (2019)
To dismiss Ms. Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy as merely an Indian counterpoint to the frequently rehashed rap film would be to deny the film’s vivid but never exaggerated realism; a year or two from now, we might question the very resonance of its rousing story – of a scrappy but starry-eyed boy from Bombay’s ghettos who rises from anonymity to fame as a poet of grungy rap – but as for now, it truly captures the zeitgeist of our times. Mr. Ranveer Singh’s Murad, the said struggler simmering with anguish to break free from the stifling social mores that cow him down, is clearly his finest hour. Rarely has an actor with such a reserve of physical energy harnessed it so skilfully to create a living and breathing portrait of despair and determination. He is almost matched by Ms. Alia Bhatt’s electrically vivacious Safina, with fury bottled up in her almost petite frame and clawing with equal fervour to bend open the bars of her own gilded cage. And it is their cry of defiance and freedom that rings the loudest and truest in what could have been yet another film about rise to riches and glory.
19 – Fan (2016)
If Mr. Shah Rukh Khan had not starred in the leading role, or roles, Maneesh Sharma’s Fan would have been merely another expensively produced suspense film, like so many that get released and it would have probably not even made to the fringes of this list. As it happens, though, there is certainly more to this film than meets the eye but without Mr. Khan playing both a fictional version of his own film star personality and an obsessed admirer who happens to possess an uncanny resemblance, it could have been a lot less intelligent. Long before last year’s mischievously metaphysical AK vs AK, this was the first film to skewer the almost deified public image of the ubiquitous film star and also the ludicrous deification that exaggerates this very image in the first place. Is it high time since one of the country’s most popular film actors wondered whether he is still relevant to today’s audiences? Are our admirers so willingly blind that they can imitate even muscles created by a computer? It is to the credit of Mr. Khan’s compulsive yet hauntingly credible performances and to Fan’s advantage that the dual portrait that emerges makes us believe that anything is possible in the world of films.
18 – English Vinglish (2012)
Ms. Gauri Shinde’s film is a simple but stirring tale of a humdrum but happy housewife who discovers inside her a zealous winner who just needed a contest to break free from that very mould. It is not the most exciting, startling or ingenious of stories as usually put to the screen but it is a story, rather admirably, that cheers and even celebrates the most seemingly easy victories that this admirably mild-mannered housewife earns on her own pluck. It was wise of Ms. Shinde to cast Ms. Sridevi, who, in her youth, played only characters the very opposite of mild-mannered or meek, as this said housewife. The actress reins herself in deftly and creates a woman of such convincing flesh and blood and such plausible development. The pluck with which she goes around distributing sweetmeats in her neighbourhood, the wounded pride with which she listens to her daughter’s jibes, the greater pain of being misunderstood when her husband waves off her misgivings and finally the confident stride with which she both learns English, corrects others at their mistakes and navigates the streets of Manhattan, these are all vivid, fascinating shades of a wonderfully rounded character and as they coalesce together seamlessly, we realise that this is the finest portrait of a woman discovering herself.
17 – Talvar (2015)
In 2008, the Noida double murder case, with a thirteen-year old girl as one of the victims, shocked and stunned the police, the press and other people across the country to silence. It inspired a lot of stale gossip but also one of the most intelligent and astute films ever made in the last decade. Ms. Meghna Gulzar’s
Talvar, written by Mr. Vishal Bhardwaj,
is a thriller with a difference. It does not try to seek out the truth of what had really happened on that fateful night, but rather reveals the deeper and more disturbing truth of our own biases and partial assumptions about the murder and then gives us a hero, in Mr. Irrfan Khan’s determined Avinash Kumar, who tries to wield the titular sword of justice, only to find the rust of corruption and prejudice blunting its edge. As an investigative film, too, it is enlivened by a perversely comic sense of realism; the incompetent police officer who muddies the evidence, the poisonous banter of the people being interviewed on national television, the cold-blooded subterfuge within the walls of the intelligence bureau and finally the laughably prudish officer who describes a missionary position in chaste Hindi, these are all unmistakable signs of a morbid darkness in front of which the real crime itself becomes insignificant.
16 – Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (2010)
Never mind its deliberately pulpy name; Mr. Dibakar Banerjee’s film, shot entirely with grainy and hand-held cameras, feels so markedly real that you would almost smell the sterile air-conditioning air of the supermarket, run by a defeated, debt-ridden man, or even taste the chlorine of the swimming pool where a corpulent man lounges as an image of gaudy vulgarity. Never before cinema, at least Indian cinema, has been so willingly honest to bare the mediocre, bawdy and all-too-true realities of a morally corrupt but still redeemable society with such blunt wit and shocking audacity. Threading together three tales of doomed love, accidental lust and intentionally malicious betrayal,
Love, Sex Aur Dhokha also introduced us to a cast of real, broken, flawed people played by young, almost anonymous faces with such believability that we never, for once, judge them for even their most grotesque failings or disbelieve in the last reserve of virtue in their pathetic souls. And yet, this is a film that startles and horrifies as much as it amuses, with perverse humour running through the tight narratives, a humour mined skilfully from the very blackness of urban depravity and decay. There is no contrived happy ending here but at least the film reminds us that to err is, after all, to be human.
15 – Udta Punjab (2016)
There are, I think, only a few directors in our film industry who not only understand the rich potency of a good story but also know how to translate it skilfully to the screen with an equally solid grasp on the sense of realism and conviction. Mr. Abhishek Chaubey happens to be one of them and while
Udta Punjab, a mostly grim and grimy story of the drug scene of Punjab and a few characters trying to make some sense of it, borrows its format from
Traffic and its narrative beats from British fiction, with such skill does he and co-writer Sudeep Sharma adapt these influences to the milieu of the said state and India that we never detect even the slightest hint of this permissible foreign impression; everything feels urgently, immediately Indian in flavour and detail. The frequently high-strung pop-star, played with such tremendous spontaneity by Mr. Shahid Kapoor, is as believable as the beaten-and-bruised migrant worker, played with equal ardour and emotional ferocity by a nearly unrecognisable Ms. Alia Bhatt: both, after all, struggle to escape the muddle that they have landed themselves in. Like the rest of this region and like the rest of the world; the film’s greatest strength is its almost universal resonance.
14 – Tumbbad (2018)
Before
Tumbbad arrived, horror was one of our most abused genres, ruined by a glaring lack of quality, wildly exaggerated performances and much unintentional hilarity. Directors Rahi Anil Barve and Adesh Prasad stabbed that genre with a surge of not only violence and terror but also such pure photographic beauty and such profound subtext flowing through the frequently shocking narrative that it will be impossible, even as things become horrifying, to look away from the screen. A timeless, haunting and elegiac tale of gluttonous greed and its bloody consequences,
Tumbbad is also a handsomely mounted period piece. Mr. Pankaj Kumar’s cinematography is not only absorbing and epic but also perceptive, detailed and poetic; an unmistakable sense of fateful life can be discerned from the masterful way in which he frames his characters against the meticulously recreated pre-independence background of the story. And the storyline, of a secret of treasure passed down from generation to generation and of an utterly greedy prospector who cannot keep his hands away from the treasure even with the grotesque demons to protect it, has a rich resonance and is suffused with irony; the very real and believable performances are of help too. In the end, the real horror lies not in those hideous monsters but rather lies coiled in a heart blackened and burned out by corruption.
13 – Lootera (2013)
It is hard to categorise the films of Mr. Vikramaditya Motwane; he is one of the few directors of the last ten years who have had the skill and versatility to try out successfully many variations of the popular film: coming-of-age drama, existential thriller, vigilante film and even a metaphysical film. But it is
Lootera that is his finest film, a skilful adaptation of a tale by O. Henry if simply for telling what could have been a predictable film narrative with the same rich depth and perceptive wit to be found in a story to be read in a book. Even beyond its literary integrity, however, this is a film of uncommon skill and mesmerising beauty. The simple story– of the titular thief who pretends to be an archaeologist and ends up falling in love with the delightfully naïve daughter of the very
zamindar on whose wealth he has planned his designs – is brought to life with the most credible strokes of characterisation and vividly elegant touches of plausible period detail. As Mr. Motwane skilfully orchestrates the unlikely but palpably passionate romance and then the heart-rending betrayal, he also sets into motion a melodrama of such emotional power that you would even believe the little bittersweet miracle with which the film ends.
12 – Queen (2014)
At a first glance, Mr. Vikas Bahl’s
Queen feels like a film that has already been made before. Young and naïve Rani Mehra, essayed in a performance of almost sublime spontaneity by Ms. Kangana Ranaut, has been informed by her groom-to-be that their upcoming wedding is to be cancelled; after some tears are shed, she decides, rather startlingly, to go on her planned honeymoon to Paris all alone. It is right from there that we see what could have been yet another film about yet another girl from suburban Delhi turn into how this girl from Delhi discovers not only herself but also a world and a different face to life she never knew. That is, of course, only describing it too didactically;
Queen might not be one of the most “original” films out there but it still works splendidly as a wonderful “novelty” and Mr. Bahl, helped by his actress and his writers, keeps things rattling along so entertainingly, in such pleasantly breezy, even silly, fashion that we hardly get the time to nit-pick. This is easily the finest example of
feel-good cinema that one can find, making us cheer for this bumbling but wholly admirable heroine and also urging us to find within us a reflection of all that’s naïve, exuberant and admirable in her.
11 – Badlapur (2015)
Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold but Mr. Sriram Raghavan’s unexpectedly brooding, almost haunting film of revenge and redemption goes even further and serves us an ice-cold heart to go along with it as well.
Badlapur, named after the desolate little town between the cities of Pune and Bombay, the first signifying the horrifying past – of the double-murder that begins the film on a suitably grim note – and the latter promising a future of absolution, is the first film of its kind to explore the literal no-man’s land between these two moral extremes. Mr. Varun Dhawan, as the boyish-faced husband and father who loses not only his family but also his innocence in that one brutal swift stroke, gave one of his most restrained yet plausibly unsettling performances. Mr. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, as the said murderer, is even more unsettling and even oddly endearing as a slippery criminal trying to escape the fact of his destructive deed but finding himself confronted with the consequence of that act. The film is essentially a story that mirrors these men’s respective paths to both nihilism and salvation over the course of fifteen years and in the process, we are compelled by the haunting realism of the story to re-examine our own thoughts and memories of what just happened.
10 – Stanley Ka Dabba (2011)
I confess to a nostalgic bit of self-indulgence by including Mr. Amole Gupte’s beautifully directed film in my list. The school in which it has been filmed, Holy Family, happens to be the very citadel within whose walls and corridors I had learned and then lost whatever I had learned. Those whitewashed classrooms with their colourful felt boards littered with drawings, those sunlit corridors where we all pranced and played, the hubbub of the teachers relaxing in their staff rooms – all are vivid memories that have coalesced into the film’s own virtues –of how it tells its unspectacular story – of a schoolboy who never brings tiffin and thus mystifies his friends and earns the ire of a bullying teacher – with such skill that more elaborate films would pale before its accomplishment. Partho, the director’s son, plays Stanley like any other charmingly raffish hero of the classroom, besotted by his English teacher while Mr. Gupte himself plays the said teacher with a touch of hilarious pugnacity. His direction is even better – he wisely refrains from barging into the natural camaraderie among these boys and reduces the importance of the mystery, revealing the poignant truth only in the end. And yet, the emotion is never exaggerated; the whole film seems like a chapter out of
David Copperfield rather than
Oliver Twist.
9 – Band Baaja Baaraat (2010)
The most commercial film in this list should be more rightfully called as a moment in cinema that its producer, the most influential film studio of Bombay, would be deservedly proud of. With
Band Baaja Baaraat, Yash Raj Films stepped decisively into the real world of real men and women living in the noisy, humdrum streets of our cities and towns, leaving behind, forever, Swiss Alps, palatial homes and chiffon sarees; for the first time, here was a romance from their stable that was equally concerned, with heartfelt earnestness, about the sky-high aspirations that their onscreen lovers nursed. Mr. Maneesh Sharma’s film might be an effortlessly endearing romance between two such young people (played with sprightly charm by both Mr. Ranveer Singh and Ms. Anushkha Sharma) but even before that, it is also a warmly written story of friendship and camaraderie as these two join hands together to do something beyond the ordinary and prove to be indispensable to each other. As Bittu Sharma and Shruti Kakkar romp around suburban and then sophisticated Delhi, orchestrating wedding parties, decorating venue after venue and thus falling inevitably in love with each other, we are entertainingly escorted through these colourful and cinematic proceedings without ever suspending our sense of belief or even the guileless hope that things will end with a well-earned smile.
8 – Sonchiriya (2019)
The dangerous dacoit or even the heroic rebel of the hinterland have become such mythical figures of our cinema that we have almost begun to worship the image of a fugitive brigand as a totem of righteous fury against the establishment. But Mr. Abhishek Chaubey’s
Sonchiriya is the first film to deconstruct that myth gently and perceptively. Like Mr. Sam Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch, to which the makers owe an equal debt of inspiration, it reveals, beneath the gritty and theatrical effect of bravado and danger, the gnawing doubts and fears in these men stranded forever in a no-man’s land between honour and redemption. Even the acting complements the sharp irony of the bleak and brutal realism of the film. Mr. Ranvir Shorey’s ruthlessly determined Vakila is forced, eventually, to confront the futility of his nihilism while Mr. Manoj Bajpayee’s compellingly weary chief Man Singh is haunted by the catastrophic consequences of his past and thus driven to his predestined fate. If
Sonchiriya does have a hero, it might be somewhere in Mr. Sushant Singh Rajput’s taciturn but tender Lakhna, a rebel who decides to do, for once, the right thing and thus lends these men a cause, to gun down the most despicable crimes that the establishment stands for. And thus, the film achieves a rugged but poignant poetry of its own.
7 – Haider (2014)
Mr. Vishal Bhardwaj has had to contrive, no matter how skilfully, a milieu or a narrative to fit into the scheme of any of the Bard’s legendary tragedies: a Bombay mob arranged like a Scottish feudal fiefdom and we also had the casteist politics of the hinterland mirroring the threat of the Turkish invasion. But with
Haider, he did not have to look any further for “something rotten in the state of Denmark” than the tumult of militant violence and military brutality in Kashmir of the 1990s, a troubling reality brought to the fore with both blunt force and sharp irony. There is a dazzling quality of surrealism, of both musical and theatrical melodrama to the proceedings and many a key incident mirrors the play beautifully, including Polonius lurking behind curtains and also the gravediggers singing at their toil. At the same time, the director transforms the personal travesty of the source into something fiercely political, as we witness just how the tragic situation finds its echoes in the lives of people who live in this beautiful but cursed valley. Mr. Shahid Kapoor, as the titular deposed heir returning to this damned Denmark, is magnificently eloquent, especially in the monologues. But especially unforgettable is this film’s Claudius, played by Mr. Kay Kay Menon with such charismatic cunning and surprising warmth that we almost believe his lies.
6 – Jagga Jasoos (2017)
Mr. Ranbir Kapoor cemented his reputation in this decade as the finest popular actor on the screen to convey doubt and disorientation within the urban man. While in most films in these ten years, his performance as an initially cocksure man questioning his own identity compelled us to swallow in the limitations of direction and writing, it was with
Jagga Jasoos that he finally found his match. Mr. Anurag Basu’s beautifully, almost whimsically directed, film, starring Mr. Kapoor, as a young man who qualifies as a great hero for boys of all ages, is the finest adventure film that I have seen for a long, long time. It is a gloriously imaginative, even silly, storyline that takes our resident school detective from deciphering crimes of passion to weapons smuggling and diabolical villains, from the hills to North African souks and then further into the wild in search of his father. But it is also told with panache and infectious surfeit of imagination and adventure, not to mention such wit and melody as well. The sights are almost as colourful as pages of storybooks – with galloping giraffes and romping ostriches among other things - and there are devilishly clever songs too, lyrics that belong more to the hilarity and satire of Monty Python than Walt Disney. And in the end, this fantasia has something wise to say as well.
5 – Shanghai (2012)
The most politically resonant film of the last ten years is not actually concerned solely with statecraft. Like all of Mr. Dibakar Banerjee’s films,
Shanghai is more about our society’s willing participation in collective self-deception; it is the first film, since Mr. Kundan Shah’s
Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron that dissects, with equally black humour, a horribly complicit yet plausible mind-set that worships relentless progress regardless of the gruesome cost it involves. Adapting Vassilis Vassilikos’ timely novel of a political assassination and its almost successful cover-up into a gritty, mofussil town being urbanised by the ruling party, Mr. Banerjee and his assistant writer Ms. Urmi Juvekar set up skilfully the story of a well-intentioned but equally imperfect activist who is slain in what is loosely disguised as an accident. No matter how skilfully the police and the political thugs try to cover up things, the truth of the matter leaks out and it is left to the film’s brilliantly acted crusaders – Mr. Emraan Hashmi’s seedy cameraman and Mr. Abhay Deol’s seemingly stoic stiff-lipped bureaucrat responsible for the sham of an enquiry – to do the right thing. And yet, the film bravely refrains from even the slightest shred of idealistic escape and instead presents its inconvenient truths with not only stark realism but an urgent immediacy that feels even timelier today.
4 – Andhadhun (2018)
It is also impossible to find a thriller in the history of our cinema that keeps on pulling off the rugs beneath our feet on every subsequent viewing; in case of most films, we can almost foresee, if we think hard, just what is about to happen and just who is the murderer hiding in the smoke and shadows. Not so with Mr. Sriram Raghavan’s
Andhadhun, easily the finest, funniest thriller since his own
Johnny Gaddar. There is a “blind” pianist, there is a femme fatale, there is an unsuspecting victim, there are seemingly innocent people with not so innocent intentions and all of these classic hallmarks of
noir are put together with such dazzling sleight of hand that every new twist and turn feels not only startling but also ingenious and intelligent. Black humour, too, flows more freely than blood through these proceedings and Mr. Raghavan and his writers keep throwing at us not merely fancy tricks but such audacious leaps of storytelling that after a while, we even start guessing the very motives of these characters and the actual crime itself becomes a mere trivial detail. Mr. Ayushmann Khurrana, as the said pianist with a knowing grin, leads a uniformly excellent cast of actors who make even the littlest parts essential to solving this dazzling mystery.
3 – The Lunchbox (2013)
Watching Mr. Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox is like listening to a wistful melody that transcends easy definition or, rather, watching a vivid, almost ethereal portrait of modern Bombay in stirring, almost mesmerising motion. And it is also a beautifully crafted ode to a beehive of a city still capable of the everyday miracles of happenstance and serendipity. The story itself is pure genius: a tiffin box packed by an earnest wife with lovingly cooked dishes and carried to its intended destination by one of the almost unerring tiffin-carriers of the city finds itself deposited on the wrong desk in a humdrum office – an aging, widowed accountant who is pleasantly surprised by the wonders of that tiffin box. Thus starts an unhurried, warm, melancholic and even tenderly romantic correspondence between these two lonely people. Mr. Batra deserves all the credit for how almost life-like and resonant this film feels – his direction never ever steps in between the almost instinctively orchestrated proceedings and the uniformly effective actors – from Mr. Irrfan Khan as the said widower, thawing slowly to rediscover her own longing for fellow-feeling and love to Ms. Nimrat Kaur playing the striking but sad-eyed wife still brimming with the hope of romantic escape – convey superbly their emotions without a false note. And this is, in the end, also a love story that makes you dare to dream.
2 – Gangs Of Wasseypur (2012)
Without any question, the most exciting, hilarious and audaciously original film of the last ten years remains to be
Gangs Of Wasseypur; Mr. Anurag Kashyap’s two-part saga has not only anarchic violence, broad and bawdy comedy, passionate vengeance and even other passions more lurid and entertaining than just revenge but also a surfeit of gentle, even mesmeric moments. And these too belong so organically to the profane, amoral yet also affable gangland that the film is staged in. It brought back Mr. Manoj Bajpayee, one of the finest (and also criminally overlooked) actors in our country’s cinema, into the star map with a performance both terrifying and tender; it introduced us to fine actors like Ms. Richa Chadha, Mr. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Ms. Huma Qureshi and Mr. Pankaj Tripathi, among many others; it established a whole new genre of the mofussil film with a unique dialect and colourful flavour of its own and it would also go on to inspire less than worthy imitations in both film and television. Mr. Kashyap’s direction is so persuasive that it keeps us remarkably entertained for more than a couple of hours for each film without ever skimping on characterisation or emotional resonance. And we feel, too, for these guiltily admirable characters – it might be a film about gun-toting, knife-wielding men but what makes it special is just how warm and romantic it can be.
1 – A Death In The Gunj (2017)
Great cinema is a form of storytelling that adds its own visual uniqueness to a story while also staying faithful to the resonance of its source.
There have been a few films in the last ten years that have been able to accomplish this honourably (
Lootera comes to the mind) but Ms. Konkona Sen Sharma’s beautifully filmed
A Death In The Gunj shows just how a simple narrative can be told on the screen with cleverly written details and still be endowed with a cinematic sense so vivid and surreal. This is the story of a pained and lonely coming-of-age, of a family holiday in the old hill town of McCluskiegunj and of a young man, sensitive and almost fragile, forced casually, without apparent malice, by the more cocksure people around him to grow up a little faster. Mr. Vikrant Massey, as this said boy, far from heroic or gifted and with eyes that brim with both pain and yearning, gave, for me, one of the most honest and poignant performances of the decade. But this exquisitely sad film, photographed beautifully and with poetic touches that you would find in a great novel, is also about how broken are the very people who pretend to be better than him. Life with its self-deception is to be found in every frame of this film, blending with the lingering shadows of death and disillusionment.
