WOMEN RULED THE YEAR IN INDIE FILMS

Something unusual happened at the movies for me at the very start of 2024.

- NAMRATA JOSHI

An imperturbable film buff that I consider myself, for the first time in my life I walked out of a Hindi film at the interval. It felt like an unbearable confinement, a waste of precious hours on an entity that offered neither any delight and insight, nor nourishment for the aesthetic urges of the soul.

As the year ends, Fighter features among the top 10 Hindi grossers; it's a different matter whether it got enough return on investment or not.

The dominant trend of past few years in Bollywood continued into 2024. A handful of largely execrable films minted vulgar crores, and the deserving ones got "discovered" later on OTT platforms, ensuring that the balance of power at the box office continued to favour the mediocre moneybags than the daring visionaries, as it always has.

Of the mainstream Hindi cinema I watched, the one which was satisfying, with quibbles intact, was Imtiaz Ali's musical Amar Singh Chamkila, the biopic of Punjab's popular performer of "naughty songs". Atul Sabharwal's Berlin—about a plot to assassinate Russian president Boris Yeltsin on his visit to India in 1993—is a spy thriller riding on atmosphere and intrigue.

In the times of unabashedly hyper-masculine portrayals in the so-called pan-Indian cinema, it was gratifying to find the year's Bollywood crown claimed by the utterly fallible but likeable and vulnerable man next door, Rajkumar Rao—with