Poulomi Das

Kane Parsons, the debut director of Backrooms, is 20 years old. It is the sort of detail you want to hold against the film, but you cannot. Parsons made his name in high school, helming a YouTube series called Backrooms. Like the film, it grew out of a 2019 image of an empty yellow room: the patron saint of the internet’s endless fascination with liminal spaces, those transitional, in-between places that feel wrong the moment you find them empty. The leap from that to an A24 feature (the film is based on his series) should have flattened the whole thing into content. Instead, Backrooms turns out cannier and more searching than its origins, spending its runtime worrying at questions about memory and what it means to be lost, which are far older than the internet that taught Parsons how to make it.

As it turns out, Partition is now the safest address in Hindi cinema if you’re a filmmaker making a film about politics, about bigotry, and about the Hindu-Muslim wound the present government keeps raking up. To set this in the present day would mean inviting forms of censorship that could range from a notice to a ban. But that isn’t the case if you reach back to 1947, where the bloodshed is settled history and nobody can accuse you of inventing it. Sriram Raghavan did it last year with Ikkis, sending Dharmendra back to Sargodha after a lifetime, crafting a film that is essentially an indictment against the cruelty of war and the real price of bigotry. Now Imtiaz Ali sends an old man to the same town and uses the journey to say almost everything a Hindi film in 2026 is otherwise forbidden to say.

Somewhere in the past five years, the Indian crime thriller stopped being a story and became a mood. We know the grammar by now. A cop with a dead spouse and a drinking problem. A city shot like it owes the cinematographer money. A murder that matters less than the grief piled on top of it. So much of streaming has settled into this groove that you can predict a whole show from its first frame of rain on a windshield. Brown, the seven-episode ZEE5 series directed by Abhinay Deo (Delhi Belly), speaks this grammar fluently. The trouble is that it doesn’t seem to know any other language. It belongs to a very particular wave, too. Call it the Mare of Easttown (2021 American crime drama series) effect. Ever since Kate Winslet trudged through a grey Pennsylvania town, Hindi storytellers have been busy assembling their own tired women with badges. Kareena Kapoor Khan did it in The Buckingham Murders. Raveena Tandon did it in Aranyak. Now Karisma Kapoor does it in Brown.

It’s rare for a Hindi filmmaker today to command the calendar Anurag Kashyap has this year: two films—Kennedy and Bandar—arriving months apart, alongside the re-release of Dev.D (2009), the cult film that imprinted his signature on Hindi cinema. It’s a fitting moment to take stock given that Kashyap occupies a complicated place in our cinema. He is among the handful of storytellers who rewired its grammar. Yet, lately his own reputation has begun to precede him. The recent output has been prolific, but also a slow bleed of the edge that once made him essential. Think a boomer cosplaying Gen Z (Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat), or a raconteur sifting through his greatest hits (Nishaanchi).

There is a certain kind of homecoming story Indian cinema has told so many times that it has become its own grammar. Someone leaves their village for greener pastures. They survive the city and then return changed, sharper, more knowing. The village is the past; they are the future. Tribeny Rai’s stirring Nepali-language debut feature, Shape of Momo, begins as if it is that story and then methodically dismantles it. The film, set to release in theatres on May 29, opens with Bishnu (Gaumaya Gurung), freshly back in her village in rural Sikkim after quitting her job in Delhi, reading out a piece of advertisement copy she has written to a room full of relatives and elders. And then, in the same breath, the conversation turns to which of the few men still living in the village might make a suitable husband for her. Her face simply shuts. That small moment is the film’s thesis: that no amount of distance, education or financial independence fully immunises a woman from the place she comes from, because the place is not just geography. It is an expectation handed down for so long that it has started to look like inheritance.

At a moment when Indian theatres are increasingly crowded with spectacle — pan-Indian actioners, franchise filmmaking and historical epics — Boong arrives as something radical: a children’s film that trusts the intelligence and emotional acuity of its young protagonist. That it is returning to theatres after becoming the first Indian film to win the BAFTA award for Best Children’s & Family Film (defeating Disney’s Zootopia) is both a milestone and a small indictment. A milestone because a Manipuri-language film has found global recognition; an indictment because the film needed that recognition to be rediscovered by Indian audiences.

About an hour into Kennedy, writer-director Anurag Kashyap springs a sequence so wickedly orchestrated that it alters the film’s grammar in an instant. In the scene, former cop Uday Shetty (Rahul Bhat) massacres a local politician and his family. The violence is merciless, yet staged with such choreographic precision — pauses, glances, the geometry of bodies collapsing across rooms — that it lands as shockingly comic as it is brutal.

Abhiraj Minawala’s Mardaani 3 begins where the franchise is most comfortable: with a crisis that demands urgency. Two girls are kidnapped from a farmhouse in Bulandshahar. One is the daughter of an Indian diplomat. The other belongs to the domestic worker employed by the family. The distinction is not subtle, and neither is the film’s point. What initially appears to be a mistake quickly escalates into a national-level crisis, exposing the familiar fault lines of power and urgency. Shivani Shivaji Roy (Rani Mukerji), now with the National Investigation Agency in Delhi, is called in to handle the case. She takes charge instantly.