Tusshar Sasi

Everyone loves a socially committed celebrity. Today, with student protests raging across India, the youth in particular are being urged to choose their idols wisely. Jana Nayagan‘s hero ‘Thalapathy’ Vijay is not one of those mega stars who show solidarity through tweets and Instagram stories. But if you notice his films in the last decade and a half, almost all of them are commentaries on social issues and how one man can solve them for the people of Tamil Nadu. When H. Vinoth’s film was banned by the CBFC days before its release in January 2026, it wasn’t hard to guess the reason. In an era when films are increasingly pushing certain propaganda and tweaking facts to suit their ideologies, here was a film that looked like an election manifesto. To a huge extent, it is.

The journey back home means something in every era. Whether it’s a war hero undertaking an obstacle-ridden voyage of over ten years or his wife refusing to concede that her husband will never return, the passage of time means something to everyone. That’s exactly why Homer’s Greek epic The Odyssey is such a good fit for Christopher Nolan, because he has a whole filmography around fractured timelines, memory, identity, homecoming, closures, and so on. Rather than bending the poem to suit his filmmaking, he discovers that its DNA has always mirrored his own. The result is perhaps the most naturally auteurist film of his career.

How do you know you’re special? Sometimes, destiny first speaks through the pulse within. One such prodigy is Moana from Motunui. The future chief of her beautiful island, she knew from day one that she was born to do big things. The spirited teen girl was the chosen one to restore the heart of the goddess of nature, Te Fiti, and save her island from perishing. It’s a story we’ve seen before in 2016, and I’ll happily watch the young Polynesian girl’s journey to greatness another time every decade. That said, the question remains: will the little warrior’s courage and sweet-natured plot be enough to pull it through?

Few Indian films have had their very existence validated so completely by the forces they are fighting. Honey Trehan’s Satluj (formerly Panjab ’95) concerns a man who bravely sought to expose state-sanctioned cover-ups and justice for the victims’ families. It then languished for years, awaiting CBFC approval, before being released on an OTT platform without any fanfare. The irony is brutal. Even before the first frame rolls, the film’s own painful journey to our screens is a mirror to the very silence it is trying to break. Trehan’s 1995-set film a somber and unsettling alternative to popular Indian cinema obsessed with hyper-masculine, uniformed heroes who shoot first and ask questions later (and sometimes never do). It gives up chest-thumping folklore for documented history and dives into a bleeding chapter of Punjab’s past that mainstream conversation has spent decades trying to forget. Satluj does not try to exploit the tragedy to create a cheap spectacle, but rather concentrates on the lives lost without explanation and the one man who refused to let them be statistics.

Hindi film history dictates that a family losing a child at the Kumbh Mela must reunite decades later for a greater cause. We’ve seen Amar Akbar Anthony wave the flag of communal harmony, and among countless others, I remember Sone Pe Suhaaga, where Nutan mistakenly flings a healthy child from a moving train while keeping the dead identical twin. It was an error on her part, but for the audience, the high came when the child grew up into Anil Kapoor. Shiv Rawail’s Alpha, the latest instalment in the YRF Spy Universe, borrows this classic template to cook up the most purposeless action film of the year.

It’s a different kind of reality check to battle the Mumbai monsoons to watch a film, only for the film to remind you that the very same showers might well have taken your life. In Baby Do Die Do, director Nachiket Samant imagines a world where Mumbaikars do not die by falling into manholes or getting swept away in man-made floods. Instead, the season’s biggest accessory – an umbrella – becomes the murder weapon. In an angle that strangely reminded me of Johnny Lever’s Chhota Chhatri in Awara Paagal Deewana, it isn’t just the weapon that adds spice to this dark comedy. Nor is it the fact that Samant’s protagonist is a woman. The third layer – that she is deaf and mute – gives the film the extra quirk it needs.

It is amusing to observe that Bollywood filmmakers seem to inhabit their own male multiverses. In Yash Chopra’s world, men serenade women with flowers and sweet nothings. For Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s men, romance is best expressed through anger issues and abuse. Imtiaz Ali populates his stories with man-children who require an older person to explain the meaning of love. Sooraj Barjatya’s men barely speak, whispering as though struggling to swallow the sanskari pill he personally concocted for them. And then there is Luv Ranjan, whose men are perpetual sufferers and whose women exist solely to ruin their peace.

“The tank is next to me.” “They are shooting at me.” “Come get me. I’m all on my own.” Few films begin with lines this freighted with irrevocability. The Voice of Hind Rajab confronts us with the real voice of a five-year-old girl whose fate is already known, stripping cinema of suspense and replacing it with something far more devastating: certainty. If urgency in the narrative holds it together as a piece of cinema, it is inevitability that makes director Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama an impossibly heartbreaking affair. The film is set inside the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s call centre in Ramallah on January 29, 2024. As the war between Israel and Palestine rages on, employees operate in a heightened emotional state, trained to respond to civilian SOS calls amid constant crisis. Omar (Motaz Malhees), Rana (Saja Kilani), Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), and Nisrine (Clara Khoury), the fictional leads, along with the late Hind Rajab’s real voice on a phone call, have guts of steel, but their hearts ache too, as do those of the viewers.