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Best Bollywood Movies of 2025

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Time to take a final look back at last year with my Best Bollywood Movies of 2025 list. The Hindi film industry has gotten bashed recently for a lack of quality titles, but last year produced a bunch of terrific movies.

As a side note, I’ve decided not to do a Worst Bollywood Movies of 2025 list. There are just too many common things that are wrong year after year — sexism, jingoism, unfunny romantic comedies that don’t recognize their own toxicity — to warrant a brand new list. I will say that my three least favorite films of 2025 can all be found on my list of Bollywood movies on Hulu.

Back to the good stuff. Here are my Top 10 Bollywood Movies of 2025, counting down from number 10.

The year’s biggest overachiever is the crime drama Bhagwat Chapter One: Raakshas. Arshad Warsi portrays the rare Hindi-cinema cop who is flawed but working on improving himself, making his own personal journey as compelling as the mystery he’s trying to solve. Running his story parallel to a romantic subplot is clever and keeps the audience guessing as to how it ties in to the main story. This was way better than I expected it to be.

Saiyaara didn’t wind up the year’s surprise box office hit for nothing. Overwrought, youthful romances used to be much more commonplace, and this engrossing drama reminds everyone why that was the case. What a treat to be introduced to two talented young lead actors — Aneet Padda and Ahaan Panday — who will undoubtedly be the stars of the future.

Most Hindi films set in Kashmir are war stories, but director Danish Renzu’s Songs of Paradise offers a refreshing change of pace. This gentle movie about a trailblazing woman in Kashmiri music history is a delight to watch.

Though it premiered at festivals in 2024, Humans in the Loop first got a wide release on Netflix in 2025, so I’m counting it here. Like Songs of Paradise, Humans in the Loop takes a quiet, focused approach to telling the stories of the Indian women who make AI possible.

In contrast, Dhoom Dhaam is a raucous adventure about an interrupted honeymoon. Yami Gautam Dhar and Pratik Gandhi are a ton of fun as a newly married couple who have a lot to learn about one another.

I adored the 2008 documentary Supermen of Malegaon, and director Reema Kagti’s fictional version of that film — Superboys of Malegaon — is a fitting tribute. It’s a perfect movie for anyone who loves movies.

Probably the biggest surprise of the year was Stolen, a film that excels as both a taut action thriller and an astute commentary on wealth inequality and institutional shortcomings. Director Keran Tejpal’s kidnapping drama is the best rural thriller since NH10, which is saying a lot.

Like Humans in the Loop, Mrs. is another film that finally got its wide release in 2025 after playing at festivals. The wait was worth it. Sanya Malhotra shines in this story of a new wife slowly crushed under the impossible expectations of her husband and father-in-law. It’s a poignant depiction of how abusers disguise their actions while still exercising control — and the resilience it takes to escape such an oppressive situation.

It made perfect sense when Homebound was selected as India’s official submission to the Oscars for Best International Feature Film. It’s a moving portrayal of two friends trying to escape poverty, only to run up against prolonged COVID business closures right as they start to make real money. Homebound captures an important moment in history while giving us characters we come to truly care about.

My favorite Hindi film of the year might also be the strangest (well, that honor might go to Crazxy). Another tale of an unhappy newlywed bride, this one takes a bizarre and hilarious turn that succeeds entirely thanks to a career-best performance from Radhika Apte. The Best Bollywood Movie of 2025 is Sister Midnight. Thank goodness this actually got a wide release and didn’t disappear after its festival run in 2024. I love this bonkers film.

Kathy’s Best Bollywood Movies of 2025

  1. Sister Midnight – stream on Hulu; buy/rent on Amazon
  2. Homebound – stream on Netflix
  3. Mrs. – stream on ZEE5
  4. Stolen – stream on Amazon Prime
  5. Superboys of Malegaon – stream on Amazon Prime
  6. Dhoom Dhaam – stream on Netflix
  7. Humans in the Loop – stream on Netflix
  8. Songs of Paradise – stream on Amazon Prime
  9. Saiyaara – stream on Netflix
  10. Bhagwat Chapter One: Raakshas – stream on ZEE5

Previous Best Movies Lists

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Movie Review: Humans in the Loop (2024)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Humans in the Loop on Netflix

Companies specializing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) would have consumers believe that their systems are fully autonomous programs that learn independently. The reality is that AI can’t identify or differentiate things unless someone tells them how. Those someones are tens of thousands of Indian workers whose job it is to identify and label the images and videos that AI trains on.

Journalist Karishma Mehrotra’s 2022 article “Human Touch” profiles several of the women who work as data labelers in the small Indian towns that provide much of the industry’s labor pool. Filmmaker Aranya Sahay adapted Mehrotra’s article into Humans in the Loop, a fiction film that focuses on one woman who finds a new direction in life working on AI training material. It’s equal parts family drama and a critical look at the foundations of a growing technology.

Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar) is starting over in her home village in Jharkhand. Her long-term, live-in relationship — an arrangement known as “Dhuku” — is over because her partner Ritesh (Vikas Gupta) wants to stay in the city and marry someone else. They have two kids together: tween daughter Dhaanu (Ridhima Singh) and baby son Guntu (Kaif Khan). The only way for Nehma to keep custody of the kids is to have a job to support them.

Nehma gets her chance working at a data labeling company in the town next door. Essentially, foreign corporations send the company collections of images and videos, the contents of those images and videos are labeled by operators, and that labeled content trains an AI program. The job is pretty mechanical — use a mouse to draw a box around all the cars in a photo of a traffic jam, for example — but it pays well enough.

The woman who runs the company, Alka (Gita Guha), explains the job to a cohort of new recruits (all of whom are women): “AI is like a child.” This resonates with Nehma. Baby Guntu is just starting to stand on his own, and she’s eager to show her city-raised daughter all the places and creatures she loved growing up in the forest. “Teaching” AI seems like a natural extension of what Nehma is doing at home.

Of course, AI isn’t a child, nor is Nehma the one to decide what to teach it. She notices that the faces she’s tagging in image sets from Western companies don’t include photos of women that look like her. She’s troubled by having to label some of the forest creatures she loves as “pests.”

[This is the nitpickiest thing I will ever write, but I’m gonna do it. Nehma believes that caterpillars are stewards who help plants thrive by eating rotten leaf parts, but some caterpillars can absolutely destroy plants. Looking at you, tomato hornworm!]

And of course, not every child is the same. After growing up in the city, Dhaanu got dropped into a new environment that has none of the comforts or technologies she grew up with. She struggles to get a signal on the cell phone her dad gave her to keep in contact. Tromping around the forest with her mom is not her idea of a good time, and she has no friends her age. Yet Nehma can’t understand why Dhaanu is unhappy.

While Humans in the Loop is most novel for its depiction of a facet of AI training few people know about, it works very well as a family drama, too. Nehma is an imperfect parent, and the tension lies in if or when she’ll figure that out. Dhaanu is at an age full of profound changes, and it’s up to her to learn how to navigate it. Guntu is there to be adorable.

Director Sahay is wise not to try to make the film bigger than it needs to be. It’s only 74 minutes long, and that feels right. She gets good performances from her cast, who all inhabit their characters nicely. The subject matter feels currently relevant but also timeless. This is filmmaking done right.

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