Sakshi is a sub-editor at the Outlook Entertainment Desk. She’s also a documentary filmmaker and mixed-media artist based in Mumbai.
Tagore’s career spanning Ray’s artistry, commercial stardom, political responsibility, and late-life reinvention demonstrates that longevity in cinema is never a matter of survival alone. It is shaped by curiosity, self-respect, and an ability to adapt without contorting oneself.
In a politically volatile environment that strips women of authority over both their interior and exterior worlds, films on girlhood focus on steadily turning the gaze inward to reclaim their selfhood.
Dhurandhar (2025) ultimately unfolds as an expansive, intense, yet uninventive Pakistan-fixated thriller that bites off more than it can chew but is tailor-made to (unfortunately) certainly sway the masses.
Dhanush’s stardom has expanded into direction, playback singing, writing, production, and global collaborations without turning into an empire narrative. He remains an actor first, even when he is everything else.
Ten years on, 'Tamasha' still holds strong recall value because it reshapes itself with each viewing. It invites new interpretations depending on the stage of life from which one approaches it. The film meditates on performance as a human condition, tracing how storytelling has shaped identity across centuries.
Gustaakh Ishq is not positioned as a broad entertainer and makes no effort to masquerade as one, choosing instead a pace that resembles a book unfolding line by line.
The film quite essentially asks: ““Till death do us part”, sure—but what if death were no longer the boundary? Who would you choose to spend eternity with?”
Bollywood has long relied on the tropes of military spectacle and the one-sided lovesick hero, yet Tere Ishk Mein (2025) manages to merge both tropes into a third worse thing.
Ten years on, Tamasha still holds strong recall value because it reshapes itself with each viewing. The film meditates on performance as a human condition, tracing how storytelling has shaped identity across centuries.
The twin trope has always been a Bollywood staple, yet Kashyap uses it to track how personal trauma mirrors societal decay. Both films are anchored in a world that imagines itself at the edge of collapse: a quasi-vigilante state with the façade of democracy, where the criminal–politician nexus shapes the UP hinterland.
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