Suchin Mehrotra

It seems poetic somehow that Kantara A Legend: Chapter 1 releases in the same month as the 10-year anniversary re-release of Baahubali. Rarely since S.S. Rajamouli’s landscape-defining two-part epic have I felt this level of “how-did-they-pull-that-off” admiration at the absolute conviction, stunning execution, and thunderous scale of an Indian film. Kantara A Legend: Chapter 1—writer-director-star Rishab Shetty’s prequel to his 2022 film, which took the nation by storm,—has all the features of a typical “sequel”. It’s bigger, flashier, more scattered, and less potent. But strictly as a feat of filmmaking and painstaking craft, it’s a thing to marvel at.

What do we want from an Anurag Kashyap film in 2025? The shadow of the term “comeback film” looms large over Nishaanchi, the filmmaker’s first theatrical release since 2022’s bewildering Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat. You step into the pulpy, promising world of Nishaanchi with one main question: Is Kashyap back? It’s a question that’s actually two: is this a good film—and is this the kind of film we want from Anurag Kashyap?

In appearance, premise, and pretty-people-packaging, Param Sundari is perhaps the most Dharma Productions-iest looking film of the year — except it comes from Maddock Films. I stepped into the familiar, formulaic love story half-expecting a quintessentially Maddock “high-concept hook.” Surely it can’t be as simple as ‘Delhi boy travels to Kerala to fall in love with a Malayali girl’? Surely there must be a time-travel angle? Perhaps Janhvi Kapoor’s character is reincarnated? Sidharth Malhotra must be a ghost, right? Except nope, it’s exactly what it appears to be — a by-the-book, clash-of-cultures, fish-out-of-water love story. Param (a sauceless Sidharth Malhotra doing his best decaf Rocky Randhawa impression) is the spoiled, entitled son of a Delhi industrialist (the always-enjoyable Sanjay Kapoor). Param spends his time as a tech investor and wants to back an experimental new dating app that claims to go beyond the usual suspects and use a person’s “energy and frequency” to find their one true soulmate.

Hopes were always riding high for Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Rajinikanth-starrer Coolie. The Tamil release is arguably 2025’s biggest blockbuster title from mainstream Indian cinema. Superstar-amplifier Lokesh is one of the hottest Indian directors, a fixture on the wishlist of most leading movie stars. After all, who wouldn’t want to be the center of a moody, bloody, hyper-stylised world—propelled by the dosage, the voltage, the entry sequence, the set pieces, the banging Anirudh soundscape, and beyond? Aside from giving Thalapathy Vijay a number of his biggest hits with Master and Leo, he also reintroduced Kamal Haasan with his crackling 2022 “comeback film” Vikram. Now, with Coolie, he sets his sights on the man whose very name is synonymous with the word ‘superstar—Rajinikanth.