25 years of Indian Cinema: 2015 was the year of Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Dil Dhadakne Do, Masaan

25 years of Indian Cinema: Zoya Akhtar’s 2015 Dil Dhadakne Do was yet another poor-little-rich-people drama that the director excelled at before she rolled over into more egalitarian ground with Gully Boy.

Written by Shubhra Gupta

November 22, 2025 04:34 PM IST

4 min read

25 years of Indian Cinema: 2015's Varun Dhawan’s vengeful young man in Badlapur, held out hope for mainstream cinema.

Among the year’s major hits, which included Bajirao Mastani, Prem Ratan Dhan Paayo, Welcome Back, Baby, Drishyam, Dilwale, two have the easiest recall.

Salman Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan, in which the star plays a devout Hanuman bhakt whose mission in life is to restore a lost little girl from Pakistan to her family, was destined to have long legs. At the time it released, tensions between India and Pakistan were running high ; today, post Operation Sindoor, they are as high as they have ever been : even then this Kabir Khan directorial felt like a peacenik dream, but at least it got made. An impossibility now.

CHECK OUT ALL STORIES FROM 25 YEARS OF INDIAN CINEMA

Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do was yet another poor-little-rich-people drama that the director excelled at before she rolled over into more egalitarian ground with Gully Boy. It had an arresting ensemble, including Anil Kapoor, Farhan Akhtar, Ranveer Singh, Priyanka Chopra, Anushka Sharma, with a memorable turn by Shefali Shah, and the most innovative one-take solid- masti-chaayi song. Watch it and smile.

Dil Dhadakne Do was released on June 5, 2015.

It was also the year when stars tried their hand at working in offbeat—for them, at least—films. Anushka Sharma as an urbanista in the gritty lost-in-Jatland adventure in NH 10, directed by Navdeep Singh and written by Sudip Sharma, and Varun Dhawan’s vengeful young man in Sriram Raghavan’s Badlapur, held out hope for mainstream cinema.

The presence of Deepika Padukone and Amitabh Bachchan lent a starry sheen to Piku, a Shoojit Sircar film that was a gift for Irrfan. With this constipated-Bengali-father-exasperated-daughter drama in which Irrfan gets a sideway role, the latter finally make the leap into a coveted bracket that had been thus-far elusive : it also became one of Irrfan’s most loved films.

But not every star tasted offbeat success. Ranbir Kapoor went hard in Bombay Velvet, Anurag Kashyap’s once-upon-a-time-in-Bombay period saga, but the film was a bust.

Yashraj tried going the small town way again, but this time with a story that felt real. Sharat Katariya’s Dum Lagaa Ke Haisha gave us Haridwar, and a fresh pair in the shape of an unlikeable Ayushmann Khurrana and his plus-sized wife, played by Bhumi Pednekar. The way the rocky relationship develops, becoming a lifetime’s moh-moh-ke-dhaage, written by Varun Grover, makes this special.

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Vicky Kaushal in Masaan.

And four, yes four, totally offbeat films went straight into my to fave list : these fiercely independent films were distributed and exhibited in the same circuit as the mainstream films, and even if they didn’t get half as many theatres as did the big starry exhibits, they have cemented their position in Best Film lists.

Anup Singh’s terrific pre-partition drama Qissa is by far and away one of Irrfan’s best performances, as haunting today as it was when I first watched it.

Neeraj Ghaywan’s debut feature Masaan, working at the intersection of old-and-new India, gave his star Vicky Kaushal and himself a jump-start ; both are working at their peak today.

Kanu Behl’s Titli was another first-time director’s singular vision– bleak, pitiless, true– from which you couldn’t lift your eyes.

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