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Hindi-language movies, popularly known as Bollywood, have been on the rise internationally for decades now. As the South Asian Diaspora continues to spread throughout the globe, they have brought food, song, dance, and movies with them for newer audiences. Similarly to how Hallyu and Korean entertainment have dominated international screens, educating audiences about Korean culture and identity, Bollywood has become a soft power diplomacy tool to present a wider, constructed image about India’s culture and people. These movies have popularized a particular kind and brand of musical movies, a characteristic that ripples across to industries like Hollywood.
In the 2010s, however, Bollywood movies sought to deconstruct the perfect images of life in India and tackled the harder subjects. A movie like Gully Boy presented life from the perspective of a young adult Muslim from the slums of Mumbai, while other films, like 2015’s Parched, have used ensemble casts of women characters to tell the story of society for contemporary Indian women. Bollywood is still very Indian in nature, but it has produced some big global hits in the past decade. These are the best Bollywood movies of the 2010s, ranked.
8 Queen
2014’s Queen is a journey about self-empowerment and not needing a man. A young Punjabi woman from Delhi, Rani (Kangana Ranaut) is timid and meek, but a day before her wedding, her fiancé calls it off. After hearing the devastating news, Rani decides to go on her pre-booked honeymoon by herself anyway. She flies to Paris, then Amsterdam, and discovers new pieces of herself in the people she meets. Queen is a universal character story, as Rani evolves from someone who bends herself backwards for other people to someone who is capable and willing to stand up for herself.
7 Dear Zindagi
Major Bollywood stars Shah Rukh Khan and Alia Bhatt appear in Dear Zindagi, a heartfelt coming-of-age movie set in Goa. Bhatt is Kaira, a young cinematographer dreaming of advancing her career to the point where she can make her own movies. But after a series of life events involving an ex-boyfriend and her landlord, she finds herself lost in the tide of life. She decides to meet up with a therapist (Khan) and get to the root of her problems, as she is now an insomniac, with underlying trauma holding her back.
6 The Lunchbox
The Lunchbox is the late Irrfan Khan’s most successful Bollywood movie, despite his career spanning across countries and decades. A young woman (Nimrat Kaur) decides to try and fix her marriage by making her husband home-cooked meals, then uses a famous delivery system in Mumbai to try and get the lunches to his work. Unfortunately, things do not go as planned, and the meal ends up in the hands of Saajan (Khan), a widowed man about to retire from his job. Once the mistake is realized, the two begin correspondence, leading to a prolific relationship between the two.
5 Kapoor and Sons
Kapoor and Sons is the family drama the world never knew it needed. Two brothers, one in the United Kingdom and the other in the United States, are estranged until their grandfather in India has a heart attack. Their parents, too, struggle with their relationship, making this family seem very dysfunctional on the surface. It is a family story many can relate to: there are awkward moments when one just does not know what to say to someone after certain events have happened; there is jealousy; and then there is a desire to escape everything. It also offers a rare slice of LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream Bollywood cinema.
4 Masaan
On the Ganges River, there lies the holy city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh. A young woman (Richa Chadda) is a teacher, but after she is caught having sex with one of her students, the student commits suicide in the bathroom. The inspector who finds them blackmails her with a recording he made, forcing her into a terrible situation that she cannot afford. On the other hand, a boy (Vicky Kaushal) from a low caste tries to escape his family’s situation by studying civil engineering, but he falls in love with a girl from a higher caste. The two stories weave into a poetic meditation about life and the notion of truly being free.
3 Dangal
Released in 2016, Dangal was a smash hit around the world, especially in China. It is based on the true story of the Phogat sisters, two girls who became competitive wrestlers despite the odds. Their father is portrayed by Aamir Khan, and he, too, was a former wrestler. Dangal tracks the journey the family made as he decides to train them in wrestling, as he was never given a son to pass his skills on to. Sexism and discrimination are only two components of their training, but, at its heart, Dangal is a family story about never giving up.
2 Gully Boy
Mumbai is home to one of India’s largest slums, but its occupants have big dreams despite the circumstances. Gully Boy is only one of these stories. Murad (Ranveer Singh) is in his final year of college, but he turns to rap music in order to express the grief he feels being in the slums and dealing with his abusive father. He begins to receive attention for the work he does, leading him down a path where the people feel a sense of visibility. It is an incredible slow-burn that excellently builds up relationships between characters to propel the emotional and personal narrative’s stakes even higher.
1 Haider
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is adapted in Haider. The tragedy tackles the story of Kashmir in the 1990s; even today, Kashmir faces rampant violence from its occupiers. Haider Meer (Shahid Kapoor) returns home from his university to uncover the secrets behind his father’s disappearance. He discovers his mother getting cozy with his father’s brother, but as he begins to unravel the threads behind why his father was ripped away, Haider becomes more radicalized and willing to resort to violence. Haider is a political film masquerading as an epic literary adaptation, thus bringing to life the ongoing suffering everyday Kashmiris face.
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