Best Of
50 Best Bollywood Movies of All Time — The Definitive List
The definitive ranked list of the greatest Bollywood films — from the golden age classics to modern masterpieces. 50 films that define Indian cinema.
50 FILMS·April 2026·By MoviesPack
Section 1
This List Doesn't Apologize for Loving Bollywood
Bollywood is the world's most prolific film industry by volume and one of its most misunderstood by prestige critics. For decades, Western film discourse treated it as spectacle without substance — a cultural curiosity defined by song-and-dance breaks and melodrama. That was always wrong, and the global success of films like Dangal, Andhadhun, Gangs of Wasseypur, and RRR has made the dismissal harder to maintain. This list covers the full spectrum: the golden age masters who built Hindi cinema's visual and narrative language, the 90s mainstream that defined a generation's romance with the form, and the contemporary filmmakers who have been quietly making some of world cinema's most vital work. Ranked by cultural significance, craft, and what it feels like to watch them — not by box office, which Bollywood has always been better at than critical respect.
Section 2
The Classics: The Films That Built Hindi Cinema
01
Sholay
1975
★8.2IMDb
Two small-time criminals are hired by a retired policeman to capture Gabbar Singh — a bandit so feared that villagers fall silent when his name is spoken. What follows is an Indian Western built around a friendship so warm and a villain so terrifying that nothing in Hindi cinema has dislodged it from its place in the culture in fifty years. Gabbar Singh ("Kitne aadmi the?") is the greatest screen villain Indian cinema has produced. Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra's chemistry is irreproducible. The ending destroyed original audiences. It still works. Watch it for Gabbar. Stay for the Jai-Veeru friendship. Find similar movies · Where to watch
02
Mughal-e-Azam
1960
★8.2IMDb
Prince Salim, heir to the Mughal throne, falls in love with Anarkali — a slave girl and court dancer — and defies Emperor Akbar himself to be with her. The emperor's fury turns a love story into a war between a father and a son, with a woman's life as the stakes. K. Asif spent nine years making this and it shows: the battle sequences remain some of the grandest in Indian cinema, and Madhubala's Anarkali is one of the most complete performances in the form's history.
03
Mother India
1957
★7.8IMDb
A rural woman is left to raise her sons alone after her husband, crippled and shamed, abandons the family. She survives debt, drought, and the village moneylender's predations through decades of backbreaking labor — and then, in the final act, her sons force her to choose between love and moral code in a scene of operatic devastation. Nargis is extraordinary in a performance that carries the entire weight of the film. India's first Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, losing narrowly to Fellini.
04
Pyaasa
1957
★8.2IMDb
A poet wanders post-Partition Bombay unable to sell his work — rejected by publishers, discarded by his family, loved only by a sex worker who recognizes what he's worth. Then he is declared dead, his poems become famous overnight, and he has to decide whether to claim what was never offered him while he was alive. An elegy for artistic integrity set against gorgeous visual melancholy. S.D. Burman's music and Waheeda Rehman make it perfect.
05
Guide
1965
★7.9IMDb
Raju starts as a tourist guide who falls for a married woman, helps her leave her husband, builds her dance career — and then, when everything falls apart, flees to a village where the locals mistake him for a holy man and expect him to fast until the rains come. R.K. Narayan's novel becomes a film about a man accidentally performing a spiritual transformation he didn't choose, and whether sincerity can redeem a life built on charm. S.D. Burman's score and Waheeda Rehman's dance sequences are among the finest in Indian film.
06
Anand
1971
★8.2IMDb
Anand knows he's dying of cancer, has maybe a year left, and has decided to use it all. He laughs, teases the nurses, calls his doctor "Babumoshai," and radiates a warmth that makes everyone around him want to be better. The film is about what a life fully lived actually looks like, not as an abstraction but in specific moments. Rajesh Khanna's performance as Anand is a once-in-a-generation thing; Amitabh Bachchan, in a supporting role, holds his own. "Babumoshai, zindagi badi honi chahiye, lambi nahi."
Section 3
The 90s: Emotion and Entertainment
07
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge
1995
★7.9IMDb
A young British-Indian woman falls in love on a Eurail trip with a charming, infuriating young man — and then has to go home to India where her father has already arranged her marriage. Raj follows her. Instead of running away with her, he decides to win her father's approval the right way. The film spent over 25 years in continuous theatrical release at Mumbai's Maratha Mandir — a record that exists nowhere in world cinema. The mustard fields of Punjab. Raj's extended hand on the departing train. Some things are justified entirely by their impact. Find similar movies · Where to watch
08
Hum Aapke Hain Koun
1994
★7.2IMDb
Two families join through their children's marriage and spend the film in a warm, endless celebration of that union — with a love story developing between the younger siblings on the side. There is almost no conflict, no villain, no dark turn. Sooraj Barjatya made a film where family is simply warm and love is uncomplicated, and Indian audiences in 1994 were hungry for exactly that. The VHS was reportedly the best-selling home video in India's history. Some films succeed by giving people what they need.
09
Rangeela
1995
★7.7IMDb
A street-smart ticket scalper named Munna is madly in love with his childhood friend Mili — who is about to become a Bollywood star, and who is falling for her sophisticated film hero director. It's a romantic triangle that refuses to play by the usual rules: the hero isn't brooding or tragic, just earnest and alive. A.R. Rahman's debut Bollywood score transformed the film's energy into something entirely new, and Urmila Matondkar's screen transformation is genuinely electric.
10
Satya
1998
★8.3IMDb
A young man arrives in Mumbai with no name, no history, and nothing to lose, and falls into the city's underworld by accident — and then by choice. The film follows him into the Mumbai gang system with a documentary-style specificity that Hindi cinema had never attempted before. Manoj Bajpayee's Bhikhu Mhatre — a man of terrifying violence who is also heartbreakingly loyal to his wife and his boss — is one of Indian cinema's great supporting performances. The film that launched the Mumbai crime genre. Find similar movies
11
Dil Chahta Hai
2001
★8.1IMDb
Three best friends finish college and discover that adult life means growing at different speeds — one falls for a divorced older woman, one has to choose between two very different girls, one is drifting through relationships without feeling anything. No melodrama, no family villain, no dramatic misunderstanding as a plot engine. Just the specific comedy and pain of friendships that have to evolve or break. Farhan Akhtar's debut changed the register of Hindi romantic comedy permanently — it was the first film that sounded like people actually talking. Find similar movies · Where to watch
Section 4
The 2000s: Hindi Cinema Finds Its Range
12
Lagaan
2001
★8.1IMDb
A drought-stricken village is told by a British officer that their tax will be tripled — unless they can beat the British garrison at cricket, a game none of them have ever played, in a match to be played in three months. They accept. Aamir Khan leads a team assembled from farmers, an untouchable, a local expert, and a British woman who switches sides. At 224 minutes it should be exhausting; instead, the cricket match in the final act is edited like a thriller and A.R. Rahman's score carries you through. Where to watch
13
Rang De Basanti
2006
★8.1IMDb
A British filmmaker comes to India to make a documentary about the freedom fighters her grandfather photographed — and casts five carefree Delhi friends who have never thought seriously about anything. Playing revolutionaries who died for their country gradually stops feeling like acting. When a real tragedy hits close to home, the line between the documentary and their own lives disappears. The pivot from comedy-drama to political thriller to tragedy is one of the most emotionally effective structural moves in Hindi cinema. Find similar movies
14
3 Idiots
2009
★8.4IMDb
Three friends meet on the first day of India's most prestigious engineering college and discover that one of them, Rancho, seems to genuinely enjoy learning — which makes him a radical in a system designed to produce fear and rote memorization. His philosophy ("pursue excellence, success will follow") sounds simple until the film shows what the alternative costs the people who can't keep up. Aamir Khan, R. Madhavan, Sharman Joshi at their best. A sharp critique of India's education system that never loses its warmth. Find similar movies · Where to watch
15
Gangs of Wasseypur
2012
★8.2IMDb
Three generations of a family wage war over the coal mafia of Dhanbad, Bihar — a blood feud that starts in the 1940s and ends in contemporary times with everyone still trying to kill each other. The film is five hours across two parts and it earns every minute: the specificity of UP-Bihar criminal culture, the ensemble cast, the moral ambiguity of men who are both monstrous and deeply human. Nothing in Hindi cinema had looked or sounded like this before it existed. Find similar movies · Where to watch
16
Taare Zameen Par
2007
★8.4IMDb
Ishaan is 8 years old and failing every subject at school, and nobody can figure out why — until a new art teacher arrives and recognizes that the boy isn't lazy or stupid, he's dyslexic and being destroyed by a system that only knows how to teach one way. Darsheel Safary gives one of the best child performances in Indian cinema — genuinely troubled, not precociously charming. The film is affecting rather than manipulative, and the distinction matters enormously. Find similar movies
17
Swades
2004
★8.2IMDb
A NASA scientist returns to a small village in India to bring back the woman who raised him — and finds himself confronted with rural poverty, caste discrimination, and the question of whether someone with his skills should go back to America or stay. No villain, no dramatic confrontation, no song-and-dance about patriotism — just a man deciding, slowly and honestly, what his life should mean. Commercially underperformed. Critically adored. One of Shah Rukh Khan's finest and least-watched performances.
18
Lage Raho Munna Bhai
2006
★8.1IMDb
A lovable Mumbai gangster pretends to be a Gandhian scholar to impress a radio host — and in preparing for the lie, starts being haunted by Gandhi's actual ghost, who coaches him through problems with non-violent solutions. "Gandhigiri" entered the Indian cultural vocabulary after this film, meaning the use of flowers and kindness where one might use threats. Rajkumar Hirani makes Gandhian philosophy feel practical and funny without ever mocking it.
19
Hera Pheri
2000
★8.2IMDb
Three broke, constantly-arguing men sharing a dingy flat accidentally receive a kidnapper's ransom call meant for someone else — and instead of hanging up, they hatch an increasingly stupid plan to make money from it. Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, and Paresh Rawal's chemistry is so specific and so alive that it launched a franchise and has generated meme content that remains active twenty-five years later. Babu Rao Apte is one of Hindi comedy's immortal creations. Find similar movies
20
Black
2005
★8.1IMDb
A girl born deaf and blind grows up in darkness and rage until a half-drunk, unconventional teacher finds his way to her mind and teaches her — painstakingly, violently, with enormous love — to communicate with the world. Then she grows up and he begins to forget. Amitabh Bachchan and Rani Mukerji give performances of total commitment. The film is overwrought and unsubtle and completely overwhelming in the way that only Bhansali's best work manages to be.
21
Omkara
2006
★7.8IMDb
A half-caste gang leader in UP's criminal political landscape promotes a loyal but low-born lieutenant over a more senior man — and the spurned man whispers poison into the leader's ear about his beautiful, faithful wife. Shakespeare's Othello, transplanted wholesale into the world of Uttar Pradesh gangsters and elections, and it fits perfectly. Ajay Devgn, Kareena Kapoor, Saif Ali Khan, and Konkona Sen Sharma are uniformly excellent. Bhardwaj understood that the Bard's themes translate when the environment is specific enough.
Section 5
The 2010s: World-Class Cinema from India
22
Dangal
2016
★8.3IMDb
Mahavir Singh Phogat was a wrestler who couldn't win the national gold for India — so he decides his daughters will. His daughters, who did not ask for this. The film is about a father's obsession becoming his daughters' reality, and then gradually their own ambition. The wrestling sequences are choreographed and shot with genuine athleticism. The father-daughter dynamic is complicated enough to resist easy sentimentality, and the film earned $330 million in China alone — one of the highest-grossing non-Hollywood films ever made. Find similar movies · Where to watch
23
Queen
2014
★8.1IMDb
Rani's fiancé calls off their wedding the day before it happens. Her family offers sympathy; she goes on her honeymoon to Paris and Amsterdam alone. She has never traveled by herself. She barely speaks English. Over two weeks she discovers she is funnier, braver, and more interesting than the life she was about to accept. Kangana Ranaut's career-defining performance. One of the rare mainstream Bollywood films to put a woman's interior life at the center without making it about a man. Find similar movies · Where to watch
24
Andhadhun
2018
★8.3IMDb
A pianist pretends to be blind to focus on his music — and while playing at an actor's apartment, witnesses a murder he can't react to without exposing his deception. Every scene from that point plants something the next scene weaponizes. Ayushmann Khurrana makes you believe every beat of a character who is constantly calculating. Tabu is terrifying in the kind of performance that makes you question your own sympathies. The ending refuses to resolve cleanly, and it's the right choice. Find similar movies · Where to watch
25
Kahaani
2012
★8.1IMDb
A heavily pregnant woman arrives in Kolkata during Durga Puja looking for her missing husband, and every government official and police officer she finds tells her the man doesn't exist. The city during the festival — the crowds, the pandals, the noise — is a character in its own right, and the final reveal recalibrates everything you thought you understood about her journey. One of Hindi cinema's most airtight screenplays, built around Vidya Balan at her most committed. Find similar movies
26
Drishyam
2015
★8.2IMDb
A cable TV operator's daughter accidentally kills a blackmailing police officer's son. The police officer's wife — herself a senior officer — will tear the town apart to find her son. The cable operator, who has no education but has watched every movie that has ever played on his network, begins constructing an alibi using everything he has learned from crime films. A thriller about a man whose only weapon is his knowledge of how crime stories work — and whether that's enough when the real police come for his family. Find similar movies
27
Barfi!
2012
★8.1IMDb
A deaf-mute man in 1970s Darjeeling charms everyone he meets — stealing, pulling pranks, falling in love — with a face so expressive he doesn't need words. He falls for two women: a girl pressured into marrying someone else, and an autistic woman who lives in her own world but finds something in him. The film's comedy is entirely visual, drawing on Chaplin and Keaton without feeling derivative, and the romance is genuinely moving. Ranbir Kapoor's most physical and generous performance.
28
Tumbbad
2018
★7.6IMDb
A man discovers a path into the lair of a forgotten god who hoards gold — the one god who was cast out of heaven for wanting everything. Every time he enters, he can grab a handful of coins before the god wakes and tries to devour him. He keeps going back. His son goes back. The film spans three decades and charts how this single act of greed consumes three generations. Six years in production, shot in perpetual monsoon rain, and unlike anything else in Indian cinema. Find similar movies
29
Gully Boy
2019
★7.9IMDb
Murad lives in Dharavi with his family, drives for a rich man, watches his father take a second wife — and at night he writes raps that say exactly what it feels like to have no space in a city that is everywhere and nowhere for him. A producer finds him. He starts performing. The film is specific about the economic conditions and social pressures that produce underground art without turning them into a lecture. "Apna time aayega" became an anthem because it was already true before the song existed. Find similar movies · Where to watch
30
Article 15
2019
★8.1IMDb
A young IPS officer is posted to a rural district in Uttar Pradesh and assigned to investigate the murder of two Dalit girls — a case everyone in the system wants closed without investigation. As he digs, he finds not a crime but a structure: caste discrimination so embedded that it generates violence that nobody calls violence. Ayushmann Khurrana plays an upper-caste officer genuinely confronting his own privilege for the first time. One of the rare mainstream Hindi films to use its star to say something structural and true. Find similar movies
31
Udaan
2010
★8.2IMDb
A 17-year-old is expelled from boarding school and sent back to his father's steel town in Jharkhand — a cold, controlling man who has already decided his son's life: factory work, engineering, no poetry. The boy writes and wants to leave. The tension between them is the entire film. Vikramaditya Motwane's debut captures something specifically true about the violence of parental expectation in India, and the cost of wanting something your family has no language for.
32
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara
2011
★8.2IMDb
Three friends on a bachelor trip through Spain — one engaged and nervous about it, one controlled by his mother and hiding it, one successful and emotionally closed off. Each leg of the trip features one of them doing something they're terrified of: skydiving, scuba diving, running with the bulls. What the film is really about is the buried resentments and jealousies that adult friendships carry when everyone is too mature to mention them. Hrithik Roshan, Farhan Akhtar, Abhay Deol, and Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy's best score. Find similar movies · Where to watch
33
PK
2014
★8.1IMDb
An alien stranded on Earth loses his only way home and spends the film trying to find God — because he's been told God has the answers to everything. What he finds instead is religion: contradictory, expensive, and commercially managed. Aamir Khan's performance is physically committed in a way that makes the satire land without feeling mean. The film generated enormous controversy in India, which means it hit exactly where it aimed. Find similar movies
34
Bajrangi Bhaijaan
2015
★8.0IMDb
A mute Pakistani girl gets separated from her mother in India and ends up in the care of a devout Hindu man who can't bring himself to lie or leave her behind. He tries to return her to her family across the India-Pakistan border — which involves crossing without documents, trusting strangers on the wrong side of every political line. The film's politics are earnest and simple: people on both sides of the border are just people. The final scene earns its enormous emotional payoff completely. Find similar movies · Where to watch
Section 6
The 2020s: New Masters
35
Pathaan
2023
★5.9IMDb
A rogue Indian spy comes out of the cold for one last mission against a former agent who has gone completely off the reservation and wants to unleash a biological weapon on India. The plotting is thin and the politics are simple, but as a spectacle event — the Dubai chase, Deepika Padukone's action sequences, John Abraham going gleefully unhinged — it delivered on every expectation. The biggest Hindi opening ever at the time of release. The culture's hunger for SRK after four years of absence was real and the film knew exactly how to answer it. Find similar movies
36
12th Fail
2023
★9.0IMDb
Manoj Sharma fails his 12th-grade exams in a rural UP school plagued by mass cheating — and refuses to cheat himself. He ends up in Delhi with nothing, sleeping on platforms, eating once a day, studying for the IAS exam he has almost no chance of passing. The film is about what honest aspiration actually costs in a system that rewards connections over merit, and what a person has to become to survive that. Vikrant Massey's career-best performance. The highest-rated Hindi film on IMDb by a significant margin, for good reason. Find similar movies · Where to watch
37
Animal
2023
★7.0IMDb
A son's entire life has been shaped by his obsession with earning his distant father's love — and the things he does in pursuit of that approval become increasingly monstrous. Three and a half hours of escalating violence and wounded masculinity. Whether the film endorses or critiques its protagonist is a debate that has not resolved and probably won't. Whatever your position, it is unquestionably Ranbir Kapoor's most committed and physically demanding performance, and it was one of 2023's most discussed films for exactly the right and wrong reasons. Find similar movies · Where to watch
Section 7
Honorable Mentions: Films That Almost Made The List
38
Masaan
2015
★8.2IMDb
Two stories in Varanasi: a young woman whose life is destroyed by a police raid on a hotel room, and a young man from a lower-caste family who falls for a girl across the caste line. Both are about the weight of shame in a city built around the idea of letting things go. The Ganges is everywhere — bodies burning on the ghats, ash in the water, the river as a thing that takes and doesn't give back. Vicky Kaushal's first major role. A genuinely beautiful film operating at the quiet end of what Indian cinema can do.
39
Haider
2014
★8.1IMDb
A young man returns to Kashmir in the 1990s to find his father missing after being turned in to the army — and evidence that his mother has moved in with his uncle, who may have been the one who turned his father in. Hamlet in the middle of a counterinsurgency, and the film refuses to simplify the politics: the army commits atrocities, the militants commit atrocities, and Haider is caught between all of it. Shahid Kapoor gives a performance of genuine psychological complexity. Controversial and artistically honest for exactly the same reason.
40
Raazi
2018
★7.8IMDb
A young Indian woman agrees to marry into a Pakistani military family to gather intelligence for India — not with training or glamour, but because her father did it before her and she wants to continue his work. She is 20 years old. She marries a man she comes to genuinely like. She does what is required of her anyway. The film is quietly devastating about the cost of patriotism when it is paid by individual people rather than abstractions. Alia Bhatt's best performance. Find similar movies · Where to watch
41
Talvar
2015
★8.3IMDb
A 14-year-old girl and the family servant are found murdered in a Noida apartment. Three different investigative agencies pursue three completely different theories, each one building a coherent case that makes another impossible. The film is told from all three perspectives and refuses to tell you which is right. Meghna Gulzar's docudrama argues that in India's justice system, the truth is often beside the point — and does so with the structure of a legal thriller that gets more disturbing the more you understand it.
42
A Wednesday
2008
★8.2IMDb
A man calls the Mumbai police commissioner and says he has planted bombs across the city. His demand: release four imprisoned terrorists, or the bombs go off. He sounds ordinary. He might be anyone. Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher play this out as a real-time two-hander, and the film uses the thriller structure to make an argument about ordinary citizens and extraordinary times. One of the most intelligent Hindi thrillers ever made, and Neeraj Pandey's most controlled work.
43
Paan Singh Tomar
2012
★8.3IMDb
Paan Singh Tomar was a seven-time national steeplechase champion and an Indian Army man who returned home to a land dispute the state refused to resolve — and eventually took matters into his own hands and became the most wanted dacoit in the Chambal valley. The film is about how the state creates the outlaws it then destroys, and Irrfan Khan's performance captures the full arc from proud soldier to cornered man with a rifle. His best work in Hindi cinema.
44
Khosla Ka Ghosla
2006
★8.2IMDb
A middle-class Delhi man saves for decades to buy a plot of land and build a house — and a local property shark simply occupies it and dares him to do something about it through the courts. The son hatches an elaborate con instead. Anupam Kher as the beleaguered, furious, deeply decent father makes you feel every injustice personally. Dibakar Banerjee's comedy is funny about specifically Indian bureaucratic misery and specifically middle-class stubbornness in the face of it.
45
Kapoor & Sons
2016
★7.8IMDb
Two estranged brothers return home because their grandfather is dying — and are forced to inhabit the family they've both spent years leaving behind. Old resentments surface, parents are revealed to be complicated people, and the older brother is carrying a secret that makes his silence make sense. Fawad Khan, Sidharth Malhotra, Alia Bhatt, and Rishi Kapoor as the chaotic, inappropriate grandfather who loves everyone. The film handles a gay character with genuine sensitivity and without melodrama, which was rare in mainstream Hindi cinema in 2016.
46
Maqbool
2003
★7.8IMDb
A loyal lieutenant to a Mumbai crime boss is in love with the boss's mistress — and she wants the boss gone. Two corrupt police officers, crooked as Shakespeare's witches, egg him on with prophecy. Irrfan Khan as Maqbool carries the ambition and the guilt simultaneously, and Tabu as the Lady Macbeth figure is one of the great manipulative performances in Hindi cinema. The Shakespeare translation is not a gimmick — it illuminates the criminal power structures and personal betrayals equally.
47
Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!
2008
★7.7IMDb
Lucky is a small-time Punjabi thief who has been stealing since childhood — not for need exactly, but because the things other people have always seemed like things he was supposed to have too. He keeps getting away. The film is funny and picaresque, following him through a series of increasingly audacious crimes, and quietly sharp about aspiration and the gap between what people are allowed to want and what they actually want. Dibakar Banerjee's best film.
48
Lunchbox
2013
★7.8IMDb
A housewife in Mumbai makes an exceptional lunch for her husband every day — he barely notices. Through a mistake in the dabba delivery system, the lunch reaches a lonely accountant who writes her a note back. They begin corresponding. Two people who have never met, both stuck in lives that don't quite fit, writing letters through lunch boxes in a city of 20 million. No melodrama, no dramatic confrontation, no resolution that arrives too easily. One of the most tender films in twenty years of Hindi cinema. Find similar movies · Where to watch
49
RRR (2022) — Telugu, But Belongs Here
★7.8IMDb
Two legendary Telugu freedom fighters — one working undercover as a British colonial officer, one working as a forest ranger hunting a missing tribal girl — become best friends without knowing who the other really is. The film asks: what happens when two men with opposing missions genuinely love each other? The interval bridge sequence is one of Indian cinema's great action set pieces, Naatu Naatu became a global phenomenon, and Ram Charan and N.T. Rama Rao Jr.'s chemistry is irreproducible. Technically not Bollywood. No list of contemporary Indian cinema is complete without it. Find similar movies · Where to watch
50
Gulaal
2009
★7.9IMDb
A first-year law student in Rajasthan gets drawn into a separatist movement led by a charismatic, dangerous man who believes Rajputana should be its own nation again. What follows is student politics, caste violence, betrayal, and a tragedy of Shakespearean depth. Kay Kay Menon's Dukey Bana is one of Hindi cinema's great screen villains — magnetic, wounded, completely ruthless. Piyush Mishra wrote the screenplay and the songs. Anurag Kashyap made this before Gangs of Wasseypur and almost nobody saw it. It deserves to be discovered by every generation that missed it.
Section 8
Where to Start If You're New to Bollywood
If you've never watched a Hindi film and want a genuine entry point, start with **Dil Chahta Hai** — it's modern, funny, and doesn't require any cultural context. Then **Andhadhun** for a thriller with no song-and-dance at all. Then **3 Idiots** for the full Bollywood experience with genuine warmth. Once you're hooked, work backward toward **Sholay** and forward toward **12th Fail**.
Section 9
Want More?
- [Browse Bollywood by rating](/best/bollywood) — our complete ranked database - [Hidden gem Indian films](/hidden-gems/bollywood) — underrated films you haven't heard of - [Movies like Gangs of Wasseypur](/similar/gangs-of-wasseypur-part-2-2012) — Indian crime epics - [Movies like Andhadhun](/similar/andhadhun-2018) — slick Bollywood thrillers - [Where to watch Bollywood films online](/where-to-watch/dangal) — streaming availability
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