The last six months have provided a wealth of incredible cinema, with enough great Indian movies to fill a (hypothetical, and thus completely legal!) 2TB hard drive. Letterboxd’s official rundown of the year’s highest-rated films thus far features a record seven Indian entries. That’s nearly one-third of the entire list, and more than enough to catch up on over the summer. However, there are just as many (if not more) great Indian movies to look forward to during the back half of 2024.

With India being one of Letterboxd’s top ten membership regions, and the largest producer of movies anywhere—more than 1,700 Indian films were released last year, in over a dozen languages—the rising popularity of Indian productions should come as no surprise, especially with crossover Telugu-language hits like the Golden Globe-nominated RRR and Kalki 2898 - AD opening the door for more international viewers. The streaming revolution has allowed Hindi-language (or Bollywood) movies to reach a wider audience than before, both at home and abroad, resulting in Kiran Rao’s Netflix social satire Laapataa Ladies becoming Letterboxd’s fifth highest-rated film this year.

The accomplished comedy-drama, only Rao’s second feature, concerns an accidental bridal switcheroo, and gets to the heart of vital feminist issues that often go under the radar in many parts of the country, concerning arranged marriages, and the rights and expectations of women in the workplace. The result is a vibrant, breezily paced entry in the canon of India’s popular mode of “social issue” cinema. Prolific Bollywood director and Letterboxd member Anurag chimes in: “My heart is so full after seeing Kiran’s soulful sincere film. Cried like a baby. And seeing a packed house brings back the hope and faith in Hindi cinema and its audience.”

Beyond the titles featured on our Halfway 2024 list, there are just as many Indian gems to look out for during the rest of the year. They run the gamut in terms of style, subject and local culture (and industry), representing a vast cross-section of imaginative, accomplished works that propels Indian cinema noticeably forward. Watchlists at the ready!

Rimdogittanga (Rapture)

Written and directed by Dominic Sangma

Dominic Sangma’s second feature, the Garo-language Rimdogittanga (Rapture) is a dreamlike drama in the vein of Thai art-house maestro Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Following the filmmaker’s mellifluous, deeply spiritual debut Ma.Ama from 2018, it asks similar questions of the afterlife while diving into Sangma’s own small-town memories, as a boy with night-blindness raised in a deeply religious community, whose superstitions fuel violent outcomes. As Letterboxd member InsistentProlix notes, the film is “a one-of-a-kind, absorbing and ethereal experience exposing the evil and fear inherent to man.” A mystery lit mostly by fireflies, it deftly examines the politics of fear that have slowly engulfed modern India—a political fabric that’s hard to ignore when discussing Indian cinema.

All We Imagine As Light

Written and directed by Payal Kapadia

Speaking of modern India, few directors are as attuned to its political environment as Payal Kapadia, whose forthcoming All We Imagine As Light was the first Indian film in competition at Cannes in three decades (and one of our favorites!), and went on to win the festival’s Grand Prix. Kapadia, whose protest docu-fiction A Night of Knowing Nothing was never released in India, follows her overtly political debut with an understated but equally radical drama. Jessie describes Kapadia’s pivot to narrative drama as the arrival of “a confident new voice in Indian cinema… pushing the boundaries of film to tell intimate and emotionally resonant stories.” A luminous work of independent cinema, All We Imagine As Light follows three working-class women in Mumbai (two of them migrant nurses who mostly speak Malayalam), in a tale of sisterhood, of the political complexities of metropolitan life, and of love lost and found, when one of their estranged husbands finally makes contact after several years abroad, leading to emotional unraveling and self-reflection.

Kill

Directed by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, written by Bhat and Ayesha Syed

Just as complicated and exhilarating—for completely different reasons—is Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s blood-soaked action-thriller Kill. The movie hit US theaters this week, but Letterboxd members were treated to an advance screening, which was met with rave reactions. “You would think that killing people every two minutes gets kind of boring, but somehow it just gets better and better,” said one member in attendance. While the movie borders on excess, it brings with it a ruthless sensibility uncharacteristic of Bollywood cinema: set entirely on a moving train, aboard which a vast horde of thieves and kidnappers comes up against a pair of highly trained soldiers, Kill loves and despises violence in equal measure, resulting in a world that revels in its wildly inventive bloodshed, but makes you feel… some kind of way about it. Brandon nicely sums up its novel approach: “There’s a phenomenal repeated beat where the villains stop to cry over their fallen brethren. Their horror and shock becomes stronger with each increasingly violent act committed by our hero.”

Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl)

Written and directed by P. S. Vinothraj

The visceral impact of brutality is a key part of another highly anticipated movie, albeit one from a vastly different filmmaker, who uses the charged expectations of violence to tell stories of women’s oppression. From Tamil director P. S. Vinothraj, Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl) is a satirical road trip movie that plays like a spiritual sequel to the director’s stunning debut Koozhangal (Pebbles) in its focused unraveling of gendered norms. What seems, at first, like a rigmarole to exorcize an allegedly possessed woman for frivolous reasons, soon transforms into an exploration of both female resilience and male hostility in a patriarchal system. All the while, Vinothraj maintains tonal balance through razor-sharp aesthetic control, which Aryan aptly describes: “The camera is always so fluid with so much movement, and the static shots don’t disrupt the flow at all.” It shifts constantly between the real and the symbolically surreal, yielding grounded anxiety mixed with propulsive cinematic mischief.

The World is Family

Directed by Anand Patwardhan

Indian cinema is often associated with escapism, but its depiction of intimate realities can be just as aesthetically engaging. Sometimes, the effectiveness of a documentary comes down to its simplicity. The World is Family, from DIY documentarian (and mainstay of Indian political cinema) Anand Patwardhan, weaves a lucid historical tapestry, depicting India’s anti-colonial struggle against the British Raj, by using decades of home videos and archival photographs from his own family. Imtiajul describes it as “a kaleidoscope of history, philosophy, and familial affection.” It transforms the director’s search for answers about his personal history into an excavation of India’s freedom movement at large during the first half of the 20th century, refracted through the deeply moving prism that is his aging mother and ailing father—bitingly acerbic subjects who become windows to the past. 

Nocturnes

Directed by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan

Conversely, an emerging trend sees new Indian documentarians adopting the visual language of cinematic drama to fill the gaps that narrative movies either can’t or won’t. The combination of government censorship and a lack of local funding leads many of these docs to be co-produced internationally, from the thriller-style 2022 journalism exposé While We Watched to ecological documentaries like All That Breathes from the same year and 2023’s Against the Tide, which stage their subjects in accordance with traditional dialogue scenes.

One especially noteworthy example is the US-India co-production Nocturnes, Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s highly observational Sundance premiere which details the environmental dangers faced by moths—while doubling as a stunning rumination on cinema itself. Indeed, Claira calls it “research as meditation.” Much of the film comprises shots of a brightly lit white bedsheet left out in the forest overnight, to which the moths are drawn so that experts can study them. But before explaining the specific dangers or solutions, the documentary draws our gaze towards this illuminated surface. In the process, Nocturnes breaks the very act of watching a movie down to its bare essentials: the relationship between the human gaze and light reflecting off a screen. The result is enrapturing, and exemplifies the allure of watching movies in the first place.