A year-end reflection on Hindi cinema through The Daily Eye’s seasoned critics—where nostalgia met urgency, spectacle met conscience, and Bollywood revealed itself as a culture in flux, debated with insight, empathy, and intellectual honesty. 

Bollywood in 2025 was marked by nostalgia, reinvention, ideological debate, and creative anxiety. Through essays, reviews, tributes, and conversations by leading critics, The Daily Eye examined Hindi cinema’s evolving identity, cultural memory, and future direction beyond box-office narratives. 

Khalid Mohamed: Memory, Absence, and the Cost of Forgetting

The year’s Bollywood discourse opens most poignantly with Khalid Mohamed, whose contributions were less about films releasing on Fridays and more about cinema as lived memory. Mohamed’s essay on the unmade Rutba—the abandoned sequel to Zubeidaa—was not simply about a script that never materialised, but about Bollywood’s deep discomfort with unresolved histories. His writing suggested that Hindi cinema often prefers closure, triumph, and reinvention over reckoning.

That idea carried forward into his moving conversation with Rehana Sultan, an artist once celebrated and then quietly erased. Mohamed’s empathy turned the spotlight on an industry that relentlessly celebrates youth while abandoning its own past. Together, these pieces framed Bollywood as a place where memory survives only if someone insists on carrying it forward.

Monojit Lahiri: Stardom, Silence, and the Long View

If Mohamed brought the ache of absence, Monojit Lahiri brought perspective—rooted in decades of proximity to Hindi cinema. Lahiri’s writing throughout 2025 returned repeatedly to one core concern: distance. In Stars Once Shined in Silence, he argued that mystery was once integral to stardom, invoking figures like Dilip Kumar and Meena Kumari to show how aura thrived on restraint. Today’s hyper-visible celebrity culture, he suggested, has replaced awe with access.

Lahiri’s examination of Saiyaara extended this argument into the present. Rather than treating the film merely as a hit, he unpacked the machinery behind it—marketing, influencers, and instant canonisation—raising a quieter, more troubling question: what happens after the first rush of adulation fades?

His essay on Manoj Bajpayee further exposed Bollywood’s rigid hierarchies, where talent is often overshadowed by typecasting. By referencing actors like Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, Lahiri reminded readers that the industry has long privileged appearance over ability—while acknowledging that OTT platforms may now offer the creative liberation mainstream cinema resists.

Sharad Raj: Ideology, Love, and Cultural Continuity  

Sharad Raj approached Bollywood through the twin lenses of ideology and emotional continuity. His tribute to Manoj Kumar reframed “Bharat” not as chest-thumping nationalism, but as cinema deeply invested in everyday survival—roti, kapda aur makaan. By revisiting Upkaar and Shor, Raj argued that social conscience once sat at the centre of mainstream Hindi cinema, not its margins.  

Raj’s parallel reading of Saiyaara differed from Lahiri’s in tone but not seriousness. Where Lahiri examined machinery, Raj focused on emotion, situating the film within a metamodern yearning for permanence and “forever love” in an age of fleeting digital intimacy. For Raj, the film’s success lay in its unapologetic sincerity.

Satyabrata Ghosh and Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri: Cinema as Memory and Music

The quieter registers of Bollywood’s past were explored beautifully by Satyabrata Ghosh, whose meditation on Khushboo became a reflection on grief, silence, and emotional ethics. Tracing the film’s literary roots to Saratchandra Chattopadhyay and its musical intimacy with R D Burman, Ghosh reminded readers of a cinema that trusted restraint.

Music as cultural memory surfaced again in Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri’s evocative portrait of Jaspal Singh, whose gentle voice once defined pastoral innocence. Chaudhuri’s companion essay on Gulzar reinforced a central belief running through The Daily Eye’s coverage: that writing, not scale, is what gives cinema longevity.

Arnab Banerjee: The Present Tense of Hindi Cinema

If much of the year reflected the past, Arnab Banerjee wrote squarely in the present tense. His reviews were sharp, political, and unafraid of discomfort. Films like Nishaanchi and Jolly LLB 3 were read as symptomatic of repetition—well-crafted but drained of urgency.

Yet Banerjee recognised sincerity when it appeared. His reading of 120 Bahadur framed the war film as memorial rather than spectacle, praising Farhan Akhtar’s restraint. In contrast, Sarzameen and Maa were critiqued for reducing complex politics and mythology into melodrama.

Representation became a fault line in Tanvi The Great, where Banerjee acknowledged intention but challenged simplification. His praise for Homebound, directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, stood out as a rare endorsement of cinema that trusts silence and dignity.

Commercial cinema did not escape scrutiny. Films like Param Sundari and De De Pyaar De 2 were read as examples of cosmetic progressiveness. Large-scale spectacles such as War 2 and Tehran, despite stars like Hrithik Roshan, Jr NTR, and John Abraham, revealed Bollywood’s ongoing struggle to balance global ambition with emotional coherence. 

The Daily Eye’s Role: Not Noise, But Nuance

The year closed on a tender note with Lahiri’s remembrance of Shah Rukh Khan—before superstardom calcified into myth. Set in 1989, filled with chai, maternal faith, and tentative ambition, the piece reminded readers that legends are shaped slowly, through belief and courtesy, not inevitability.

Taken together, these writings reveal not one Bollywood, but many—sometimes colliding, sometimes coexisting. What The Daily Eye offered in 2025 was not consensus, but consolidation: a space where seasoned voices could debate, remember, critique, and contextualise Hindi cinema without haste.

In an era of algorithms and outrage, the opinion leaders writing for The Daily Eye positioned the online magazine as a cultural interlocutor—treating entertainment not as distraction, but as a living record of who we are, and who we are becoming.  

You can read all the articles published in 2025 here.