Best of 2025: Entertainment: Scene Stealers

Friends Forever

Homebound | Director ›› Neeraj Ghaywan | Cast ›› Ishaan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa, Janhvi Kapoor, Shalini Vatsa | Hindi

 Martin Scorsese is its executive producer for a reason. Based on a story in the New York Times by Basharat Peer, Homebound chronicles the friendship between two young men from marginalised communities, Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter) and Chandan (Vishal Jethwa), as they struggle to find jobs that will give them the dig­nity denied to them by birth, and then, when the pandemic breaks, to find their way home from the Surat mill in which they’ve been working. Stripped of ev­erything except their humanity, Shoaib and Chandan look out for each other and their families. Despite the tragedy, there is something so hopeful about the film that it makes it worth living in a polarised world.

Love and Other Demons

Dhadak 2 | Director ›› Shazia Iqbal | Cast ›› Siddhant Chaturvedi, Triptii Dimri, Zakir Hussain, Saurabh Sachdeva | Hindi

Kal hamara hai (Tomorrow is ours)”. As a student leader bids farewell to his acolytes, denied a stipend for doctoral thesis, Neel (Siddhant Chaturvedi)—the young man at the heart of the movie— breaks down. He wants education so he can stand on his own feet and demand his constitutional rights. But what can the Constitution do in the face of deep-root­ed prejudice? Shazia Iqbal’s angry Dhadak 2 uses a seemingly conventional rich girl-poor boy romance and gives it the heft of an inter-caste relation­ship that threatens all sorts of norms. If the monologue at the end doesn’t make you bleed emotionally, you have no heart.

Hope Against Hope

Baksho Bondi | Director ›› Tanushree Das and Saumyananda Sahi | Cast ›› Tillotama Shome, Chandan Bisht, Sayan Karmakar | Bengali

Maya (Tillotama Shome) irons clothes, cleans homes, even tries her hand at a poultry business, deter­mined to make up for her errant husband’s (Chandan Bisht) eternal disappointments in Baksho Bondi. No matter how much she tries, he refuses to give up either the bottle or the senseless rage that descends on him when he consumes its content. Her middle-class family despises her; she is a reminder to them how far down the rabbit hole one can descend. Her neighbours think she is too posh. But she perseveres, cycling from one job to the other, hoping for a better life for her family. Shome is outstand­ing as the woman with the wistful smile and steel in her spine.

Girl Power

Lokah: Chapter 1: Chandra | Director ›› Dominic Arun | Cast ›› Kalyani Priyadarshan, Naslen, Tovino Thomas, Sandy Malayalam

 She walks through the night, saving friends, slaying enemies, the blue streak in her hair streaming in the air. Chandra (Kalyani Priyadarshan) is a yakshi unbound, sent to protect rather than destroy. Studded with Easter eggs dedicated to beloved icon Mohanlal, Mammootty remixes and the promise of future chapters with Tovino Thomas and Dulquer Salmaan (also the producer), Lokah is a leap of faith for the Malayalam film industry and a product of actor and writer Santhy Balachandran’s in­tricate mind. With a crackerjack soundtrack and some charming slacker bros led by Naslen, Lokah is what young people would call a banger.

Man and Machine

Humans In The Loop | Director ›› Aranya Sahay | Cast ›› Sonal Madhushankar, Ridhima Singh, Gita Guha Hindi/Kurukh

How we learn and what we learn is so important and Humans in the Loop addresses it beautifully. A plant-eating insect could actually be useful because it eats only the damaged portion of the leaf. A baby’s first steps can inform the way AI (Artificial Intelli­gence) models are made. AI is like a child, it learns what we teach it, says Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar), a young tribal mother, to her supervisor in a data labelling centre in Jharkhand which is connected to an American firm. Aranya Sahay’s stunning film brings the transnational AI industry right down to its roots, and tells us how much we could get right and wrong.