Sahir Avik D’souza

We need to talk about Bollywood. Not as a source of magnificently uplifting movies with great songs and flamboyant costumes – that’s a given – but as a term. For the purposes of this list, we’re using it as a catch-all for the full multitude of Indian film industries. This, we know, will upset purists who will point out – correctly – that it should only be used to refer to the Hindi film industry based in Mumbai. But rightly or wrongly, the term has come to represent Indian cinema more broadly, taking in everything from the Telugu-language films of Hyderabad to the very un-Bollywood work of Kolkata great Satyajit Ray. It’s an imperfect framework to examine a complex, multilingual film culture, but it’s a great way to introduce a tonne of worthy movies to dive into. Which brings us to our next dilemma, because choosing a definitive ‘best-of’ list is an impossible task. Our top 100 is a bulging, wildly varied collection of our favourites: there are rom-coms like Jab We Met, sports dramas like Chak De! India and Lagaan, ‘curry westerns’ like Sholay, black-and-white tragedies like Pyaasa and Awaara, coming-of-age classics like Dil Chahta Hai and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, and art-house staples like Ardh Satya and Ankur. Our picks are as diverse as our experts, ranging from UK-based Bollywood radio jockey Anushka Arora and Indian journalist-turned-screenwriter Aniruddha Guha. Our contributors also include writer-director Varun Grover who penned the lyrics for Gangs of Wasseypur (fe

Documentarian and cinephile extraordinaire Mark Cousins’s new film tells the enthralling story of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, a post-war modernist artist who was born in Scotland in 1912 and worked in Cornwall. Cousins knows many of his viewers will come to his film with no knowledge of this relatively under-the-radar British artist, so he makes a film that reflects and displays her art – and is in itself a glowing tribute to her work. A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is as alive as its subject’s work was to physical texture, geometric form, angles, lines and colour. Cousins lingers on Barns-Graham’s notebooks, filled with coloured grids structured according to her obsessive mathematical calculations. Narrated mostly by the filmmaker himself, his curiosity about her brain, which he refers to throughout, helps him investigate her work more closely, and bring it into his own filmmaking. At one point, for instance, he frames his computer screen from a side angle whose one-point perspective Barns-Graham would have been proud of. The film spans her life chronologically (she died in 2004 at 91) – paying attention to her early work in St Ives, visiting and touchingly re-framing the very scenes she painted. Access to the artist’s archive allows Cousins to intercut, beautifully, between his own footage and old photographs. He creates a continuity between her work and his image, which brings her work into the present, to his audience. The real hero of this film is the artist herself But

In Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, Ugyen Dorji (Sherab Dorji) is being trained to be a teacher in his native Thimphu, Bhutan, but he wants to go to Australia to become a singer. He doesn’t feel connected to his country or his people. He then makes a physical journey that will stimulate an emotional journey – to his roots, to his culture, to his purpose. Lunana was nominated for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film last year. Made almost entirely in Bhutan by debutant Pawo Choyning Dorji, it was the first Bhutanese movie to be nominated in that category. It’s set in Lunana, an unbelievably remote mountain settlement of 56 individuals. It took Dorji and his crew eight days to trek there, with mules to carry all their equipment. In the film, a very reluctant Ugyen must make the same journey when he is sent to teach at the Lunana school. He’s an unpleasant traveller, grumbling to his indulgent guides, dragging his feet and signalling the end of any interaction by sliding his headphones on. Those cans are symbols of his urban, Westernised existence. But as he approaches Lunana, the batteries die. If he is to forge a connection with the villagers of Lunana, and his students, he must shake off his city trappings. This Oscar-nomined drama is suffused with a warm glow One small quibble is that we’re never in any doubt that Ugyen will forge that connection. When he declines to join his guides’ folk singing, saying, “I don’t sing such songs,” you know by the end he will. Still,

In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) was taken by force from his cousins’ house in Mississippi, assaulted and murdered. Emmett’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley (The Harder They Fall’s Danielle Deadwyler) insisted that the world see how her son’s body had been brutalised. She held an open-casket funeral and invited journalists to photograph the body, creating images that were widely distributed in newspapers and spurred on the Civil Rights movement. In Till, Clemency director Chinonye Chukwu powerfully memorialises Mamie’s call to bear witness. From the opening shot, when a low-angle camera rises gradually to frame Mamie’s face, Chukwu and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski’s inventive visual style asks us to observe and witness this remarkable woman. To witness her grief and despair at Emmett’s death, but in earlier scenes, also to witness her thrumming nervousness at the threats this racist society holds for her son. As his train leaves the platform, drawing him away from his mother, and safety, the camera zooms in on her anxious face. A startling cut-to-black ramps up the foreboding.For Emmett has been raised in relatively liberal Chicago, a bright, smiling, upbeat boy who is blind to the racial hatred of the conservative South. He doesn’t know what Mamie knows: that if he doesn’t toe the segregated line, he will be killed.  The inventive visual style asks us to observe and witness this remarkable woman When the tragic news is delivered to Mamie, Chukwu underpins the shock o

This assured debut from director Nikyatu Jusu is the story of Aisha (Anna Diop, fierce), who immigrates to the US from Senegal for the proverbial ‘better life’. Nanny is co-produced by horror studio Blumhouse, but don’t expect jump scares. Instead, a creepy thread runs through a film that, at its heart, is really a wrenching drama about immigrant mothers, separated families, raising children and guilt. Aisha, who has a master’s degree in English and French, works as a nanny for Rose (Rose Decker), the child of a white couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector). She saves money to bring her son over from Senegal. Jusu, who wrote the film, illustrates this simple storyline with mythical resonances, race relations, recurring themes and a striking visual style. Cinematographer Rina Yang, fresh off her memorable work in Taylor Swift’s All Too Well: The Short Film, uses sharply coloured lighting and low-angle frames to create a brooding menace. Adding to the atmosphere are the African myths that are weaved into the film’s fabric and visuals. Aisha reads Rose a picture book about Anansi the spider, a trickster West African god, while Aisha’s boyfriend’s grandmother (Leslie Uggams) tells her about a water spirit called Mami Wata. It swings with aplomb from moments of tenderness and lightness to tragedy and cruelty Aisha describes Anansi as physically small, so he must rely on his intelligence. Something similar applies to Aisha herself: she has no capital in this new