The flood of fake news on social media has made our judgement of the information we consume weaker than ever before. But if we wish to gain an understanding of the “truth”, we must question the very pillars we base our lives on, like Bauji in Rajat Kapoor’s 2014 film.

Kesari, a retelling of the events of the Battle of Saragarhi, tells you nothing about the clash between the valiant 21 Sikh soldiers of the British Indian Army and 10,000 Afghan tribesmen that a quick Google search will not. The battle is uninspiring and unnecessarily long drawn-out, and there is little imagination in the fight sequences.

Vasan Bala’s Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota is an affectionate paean to childhood dreams without any filters of practicality as well as a tender tribute to a life spent at – and elevated by – the movies. Almost every frame of the film is a treasure hunt of retro movie references.

Ritesh Batra spent close to a year to put together Photograph through global pre-sales, selling it in every territory of the world to different distributors before actually shooting it. It’s a remarkable demonstration of a director maximising his reputation to buy his stories the kind of independence that even mainstream filmmakers crave for.

In the midst of election season when Bollywood is all too willing to play along with the ruling party’s narrative, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Mere Pyaare Prime Minister just adds to that noise: a film that is so much about its expired message that it forgets to have a believable story.

Photograph marks Ritesh Batra’s return to writing and directing a Hindi feature film six years after The Lunchbox. His “star-crossed lovers” are separated by class, religion, and aspiration. And yet, both of them lead their lives for others, in this coming-of-age story.

Hamid is a gentle tale of a Kashmiri child’s yearning for his missing father. It is essentially a story of violence – you don’t see it but experience it in full force. Hamid focuses on a particularly gruesome brand of emotional violence that marks the stories of Kashmir’s “disappeared” men.

In the last three years, Sanya Malhotra has acted in films like Pataakha and Badhaai Ho, which offer a testament to her versatility. Now with her extraordinary performance in Ritesh Batra’s Photograph, the actress is finally ready to step out of Dangal’s shadow.

In the decade that she has been in Bollywood, Rasika Dugal has happily inhabited films such as Manto with a single-mindedness that serves her characters without drawing attention to herself. It’s why it’s impossible to forget how her characters mould a film, even when you might fail to remember her presence in them.

Sujoy Ghosh's Badla, starring Amitabh Bachchan and Tapsee Pannu suffers from an acute Kahaani hangover. But unlike the Vidya Balan-starrer, Badla falls short of being extraordinary or ingenious because it doesn't manage to fully sustain the mystery of its unreliable narrator.