Kabir Khan’s Amazon show The Forgotten Army is a welcome departure from hyper-jingoistic historical epics that have become par for the course today. But Khan never quite gets a grip on the complexities of the Indian National Army, which often clashed with its own countrymen who were part of the British army.

Only if Street Dancer 3D, starring Varun Dhawan, Shraddha Kapoor, and Prabhudeva, focussed more on the dancing and less on trying to solve the refugee crisis, we would’ve had ourselves an entertaining movie.

Kangana Ranaut’s latest release Panga stands overshadowed by the theatrics on display during her film promotion on Thursday. Ranaut said that senior lawyer Indiria Jaising should be thrown in jail along with the 2012 Delhi gang rape convicts for suggesting that they be pardoned. For an actor who has carefully pitched herself as the champion of feminism, her comments against Jaising are deeply misogynistic.

Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari's Panga stars Kangana Ranaut as Jaya Nigam, a 32-year-old former kabaddi champion readying for a comeback after seven years. It's an effective crowd-pleaser that works better as a quiet ode to the self-sustaining nature of sisterhood.

Disco Dancer gave us a hero who picked up the guitar instead of the gun. It ushered in an era of Bollywood dance films, which peaked in the ’80s and early ’90s. However, few have earned the cult status as the Mithun Chakraborty film. Does Street Dancer 3D stand a chance?

Twenty years ago, Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani that starred Shah Rukh Khan and Juhi Chawla, featured a news channel that toed the government’s narrative and paid goons hired by a politician to orchestrate riots. It ends on a positive note where codes of democracy are honoured and protestors usher in a change. Today, as the entire country protests against the CAA-NRC, the film’s subtext has never been more relevant.

After the success of Aankhen in 1993, Chunky Pandey practically had no work. That’s when directors from Dhallywood, the Bangladesh film industry, came knocking on his door. Pandey dived right in and became an instant superstar.

Navjot Gulati’s Jai Mummy Di revolves around two love-birds trying to convince their warring mothers to resolve their issues with each other. It stretches a one-line premise until it’s devoid of any humour. The last thing Bollywood needs is yet another film that treats Punjabis as a punchline.

Meghna Gulzar’s Chhapaak struggles to make the connection that an acid attack isn’t only directed toward defacing a woman’s face and crushing her aspirations but also erasing her from society’s conscience. Last year’s Malayalam drama Uyare starring Parvathy as an acid-attack survivor gets that right.

Ajay Devgn’s self-seriousness in Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior is unbearable. But Saif Ali Khan’s gleeful irreverence makes the villainy of Udaybhan Rathod, a Rajput general in Aurangzeb’s army, extremely enjoyable.

Who’d have thought that KRK of the nonsensical reviews fame would actually make sense in a time of political crisis? And Kartik Aaryan would get a thumbs-up from India’s liberals?

As Malti, an acid attack survivor, Deepika Padukone delivers a moving, invested performance in the uneven Chhapaak, without indulging in self-pity. It is to her credit that despite the prosthetics, her performance feels neither artificial nor gimmicky.

In the world that we live in today, which is marred by discrimination toward minorities and a breathless demand for proof of citizenship, Amar Akbar Anthony’s secular universe almost seems utopian. It’s funny because Manmohan Desai’s portrait of India is actually the India that our ancestors fought for.

The dullness of Ghost Stories dilutes the urgency of a horror anthology. In the times that we live in, horror is everywhere you look – in state-sanctioned violence, in the militarisation of the police force, the othering of minorities, and in the clampdown of dissent. It’s probably why Dibakar Banerjee’s segment stands out: the director doesn’t just make a film, but also a statement.

For many anti-CAA protesters, the resistance is also about standing up to the bigotry of family and friends. It’s imperative how Dharmputra, a film made over five decades ago, has an answer for it: call out objectionable views regardless of who holds them.

As everyone will tell you, this year has been a particularly unremarkable year for Bollywood. The silver lining has been the versatile, inventive performances that have come from the most experimental of films and actors. From Tapsee Pannu and Ranvir Shorey to Geetika Vidya Olyan and Ranveer Singh, here are the 10 best performances of 2019.

Good Newwz, starring Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Diljit Dosanjh, and Kiara Advani, revolves around a mix-up at a fertility clinic that swaps the sperm of the two couples struggling to get pregnant. It’s humour is derived by playing up stereotypes, Dosanjh mispronouncing sperm as “spam”, and fart jokes.

An Indian student is more like Chatur Ramalingam and Raju Rastogi. In school, most of us gave in to rote learning, and in college like Raju we had our insecurities. It’s precisely why 10 years later, I still cannot relate to the exceptional Rancho.

During the Emergency, Kishore Kumar, Manoj Kumar, and Dev Anand emerged as the fiercest voices against the establishment. Even as their songs and films were banned from Doordarshan, they remain undeterred. Why does the current crop of Bollywood A-listers choose to remain “apolitical” even as anti-CAA protests grip the nation?

The first few minutes of Dabangg 3 do an incredible job of lowering expectations, foreshadowing in a way, the unpardonable daftness that makes up the film’s 162-minute runtime. Eventually it becomes clearer that this film is just an excuse for 53-year-old Khan to romance actresses half his age.

Bollywood, much like the government, has fed us an idea of nationhood that is so much bigger than ourselves, most of us tend to struggle to understand our place in it. Swades, which turns 15 today, showed us an alternate version. In Mohan Bhargava, it gave us a deshbhakt we could imagine ourselves being, some day.

Considering the scale of the student protests against CAA, how come none of Bollywood’s “A-listers” have made official statements yet? Sushant Singh, who resigned from “Savdhaan India” a day after he joined, the protests may offer a clue.

Personally for me, 2010s was a decade of finally embracing adulthood. It was the time I stopped being fascinated with the Rajs and Rahuls of Bollywood. Instead my heroes were Piku, a daughter who indulged her father, and the Queen, who decided to go on a solo honeymoon.

While films like Padman and Toilet: Ek Prem Katha have ended up looking like glorified public service cinema with a male saviour complex, Shyam Benegal’s Hari-Bhari is a fine example of building a compelling story about women’s autonomy.

Mardaani 2 is nothing more than just an excuse to ride on the overwhelming public rage against the inaction towards violence against women. It looks to satiate the dangerous demands of mob justice to such an extent that the film ends up romanticising it.

Back in 1996, Amol Palekar’s Daayraa, that revolved around a love story between a transvestite and a gang-raped woman, questioned sexual identities and saw trans people as a “miracle of nature”. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, however, refuses to see the trans community in the same light.

Long before Hindi cinema made an aesthetic out of the middle-class, Shimit Amin's criminally underrated Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, offered a distinctive snapshot of the challenges of middle-class employment, carving with a comical clarity that the good employee is not always the right employee.

ChaalBaaz is not a Rajinikant movie or a Sunny Deol movie. It’s instead a Sridevi movie. She is indeed the superstar, the good old “Michaeli Jacksoni”, who single-handedly drives the movie through her impeccable comic timing.

The biggest takeaway of Pati Patni Aur Woh is that director Mudassar Aziz has a worse understanding of the relationship between man and woman than Luv Ranjan. Bhumi Pednekar is the only bright spark of this supremely pointless outing, but even she loses interest in the proceedings midway.

Ashutosh Gowariker's Panipat spends three overdrawn hours harping on the nobility of a loss, priming the Marathas' defeat in "The Third Battle of Panipat" not as a failure, but as a sacrifice. It demands the average Indian viewer’s sympathy and also their unfaltering allegiance.