Ishita Sengupta

History is proof that the most memorable Hindi films have centred on impossible deals. I will offer some examples. In Raj Kanwar’s Judaai (1997), a wife sold her husband to another woman for a briefcase of cash. In Satish Kaushik’s Hum Aapke Dil Mein Rehte Hain (1999), the two principal characters enter into a one-year marriage contract; in S. Shankar’s Nayak: The Real Hero (2001), a journalist makes a deal with a chief minister to fill in his shoes for a day. Apart from finding Anil Kapoor, the actor present in all three films, either brokering deals or being brokered in such agreements, the instances highlight the commonality of these segues.

In a literal world, ‘Baksho Bondi’ — Bengali words carrying set meanings — need not exist together. When translated to English, ‘baksho’ means ‘box’ and ‘bondi’ is ‘captive’; both denoting the idea of being boxed up. But then again, in a literal world the verbatim translation of ‘Baksho Bondi’ would be a phrase: captive in a box. Yet first-time directors Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi forsake precision in favour of interpretation, choosing Shadowbox (Baksho Bondi, 2025), meaning to fight with an imaginary adversary, as the English title, and in doing so, shrink the subjectivity of a person to the objectivity of an experience. The result is a film that unfolds as an interplay of both titles —imbued with the angst of confinement and the spirit of resistance— while mirroring the ambiguity that comes with it. Maya (Tillotama Shome) lives with her husband and son in Barrackpore, a neighbourhood located at the fringes of Kolkata, a densely populated Indian city. She works constantly although the specificity of her labour takes shape later. She irons clothes and ferries them from door to door on a cycle, and does domestic work for a family. In between, she outlines her husband’s routine and instructs their teenage son Debu to help him with it.

Like all bad films, Kalees’ Baby John gets worse by the second. But like a special kind of bad film, the progression happens in leaps and bounds. If the first fifteen minutes are infuriating, half an hour later the film makes you question your life’s choices. By the time the first half closes, you are having an existential meltdown and as the end credits roll, your orientation to reality has altered. Was that real? Was he real? Is any of this real or are we stuck in a parallel universe of Atlee’s imagination where everything on screen unravels as a duller version of his stylistic choices?

Three women, monsoon and a severe city. If Payal Kapadia’s iridescent All We Imagine as Light was a novel, there would be dried flowers stuck between its pages. Since it is a film, the intangible feeling is imbued with visual tactility. It is present in the way Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a middle-aged woman, holds a totem of cold technology within the warmth of her embrace. It is embossed on the face of Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a woman in the middle of a crisis, as she listens to a fiery political speech about reclaiming what is hers. And it drips from the text messages a young Anu (Divya Prabha) sends to her lover: “I am sending you kisses through the clouds so that when it rains my kisses touch your lips.” Kapadia’s film is suffused with such ache that if you extend your hand you can touch it.

With Freedom at Midnight, Nikhil Advani continues looking at big cultural moments through the microscopic gaze of an insider. Across the two seasons of his breakout show Mumbai Diaries, the filmmaker portrayed pressing social crises through the labour of medical practitioners attending to the casualties. This shift in slant sidestepped the showiness prone to cinematic excess and allowed for a more intimate rendering of public events, transforming, therefore, the narrative around them. In his latest long-form work, Advani turns his gaze to the wide spectrum of India’s independence and reiterates his style of focusing on the bureaucratic bottleneck, telling the story therefore of the people living inside towering buildings and not on the street. Freedom at Midnight is about the historicity of 1947 conveyed through the lives of those who curated the history.

Of all the improbable things in Rohit Shetty’s Singham Again, like a car flying over a helicopter, like the same car landing without a scratch, like gifted actors dialling down their craft to match the trite script, like six people writing that script, like Ajay Devgn mistaking walking for acting, like the film mistaking walking for acting, the one that sticks out the most is Shetty assembling half the Hindi film industry (an exaggeration but you get the drift) to combat Arjun Kapoor.

In Vasan Bala’s Jigra (Courage) Alia Bhatt is Amitabh Bachchan. The suggestion seems both foolish and foolhardy, not least because both actors have disparate, almost contrasting, physicalities. They act differently, they react differently. And more crucially, a punch lands on them differently. If Bachchan in his youth stumbled upon being hit, then Bhatt crumples like a paper bag. If the former’s daunting presence intimidates the frame then the latter’s diminutive silhouette makes space for others. Alia Bhatt is nothing like Amitabh Bachchan yet Bala insists that she is, for she has the jigra.