Never watched a Hindi film? Start here.
Ten films for a first pass at Hindi cinema, in the order to watch them.
You are about to watch a film that runs three hours, stops halfway for an intermission and breaks into song five or six times, and by the end you will understand why a billion people would not have it any other way. Hindi films are built differently, on purpose. A Hollywood film picks a genre and stays in it; a Hindi film wants your whole evening, so the comedy, the romance, the fight, the tearjerker and the dance number all come on one ticket, which is what people mean when they call a movie masala. The songs are where the film says what its characters cannot. The length makes it a meal rather than a snack. The feelings run big because the audience came to feel them big. Give it two films and your calibration resets.
India makes films in twenty languages, and Hindi is the one that travels: the Bombay industry, the biggest star system, the films your Indian friends abroad grew up on wherever their families came from. The South is its own world. Tamil and Telugu cinema now go bigger and louder than Bombay, with star worship to match. Malayalam cinema, from Kerala, is small, quiet and beautifully written, the critics’ favourite (we have a pack for that too). Bengal gave the world Satyajit Ray. Hindi sits in the middle of all of it, the mainstream everyone else pushes against, which makes it the right place to start.
These ten are in order, and the order is the point. We begin with the films closest to what you already watch and walk backwards in time, adding one thing Hindi cinema does at each step: first the length, then the songs, then the full song-and-dance grammar, then melodrama played straight. By number six you will stop noticing the subtitles. By number ten you will be watching a film from 1957 and feeling it rather than studying it. Skip around if you must, but the first three are the first three for a reason.
013 Idiots (2009)
The door. A campus comedy about three engineering students and the cost of living someone else’s plan for you. Funny in a way that needs no translation, modern enough that nothing feels foreign except the running time, and that is lesson one: it is three hours and you will not check your watch. This is the film your Indian friends have been telling you about for fifteen years.
Kids: fine from about 10.
Rent on Google Play Movies, YouTube
02Dangal (2016)
The true story of a wrestler who trains his daughters to beat the boys, then the world. Shaped the way a Western sports film is shaped, so you know where you are, with one difference: the matches themselves are gripping, and the father is allowed to be wrong. Aamir Khan again, on purpose. He is the safest pair of hands for a first week.
Kids: fine from about 10.
On Netflix · Rent on Google Play Movies, YouTube, Apple TV
03Andhadhun (2018)
A blind pianist witnesses a murder. Or does he see it? The tightest Hindi thriller in a decade, and the film to hand anyone who thinks Bollywood is all songs, because it has almost none. It goes third so you know the range is there before we start turning the volume up.
Kids: 12+.
Rent on Apple TV, Google Play Movies, YouTube
04Queen (2014)
Dumped a week before her wedding, she takes the honeymoon alone, to Paris and Amsterdam. Small, warm, funny, and about a woman learning to like herself, which Hindi cinema is quietly very good at. This is the side of the industry that runs on writing rather than spectacle, and it gets better as it goes.
Kids: fine.
Rent on Apple TV, Google Play Movies, YouTube
0512th Fail (2023)
A boy from a village that runs on cheating decides to become an honest police officer. The word-of-mouth hit of its year, made for a fraction of the budgets around it, and proof that the biggest emotion in a Hindi blockbuster can be a study montage. This is where the industry is right now.
Kids: 12+.
On Netflix, Hulu
06Barfi! (2012)
A romance built around a charmer who cannot hear or speak, told almost without dialogue, with a debt to Chaplin and Keaton. The halfway point on purpose: the language barrier vanishes here, and you get your first full dose of the other register, the big, unembarrassed heart. Watch it with someone.
Kids: yes.
Not streaming in US yet. We check every Friday.
07Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001)
Villagers stake their taxes on a cricket match against their colonial rulers, 1893. Nearly four hours, an intermission, songs that are full production numbers, and an Oscar nomination. The first step into the classical form, and it earns every minute: you will know the rules of cricket by the end and you will care about them. If you make it here, you are in.
Kids: yes.
Rent on Google Play Movies, YouTube
Two London kids fall in love on a Eurail trip; then he follows her to Punjab to win her father over rather than run away with her. The film that defined the nineties, the diaspora and Shah Rukh Khan, and it has played at one Mumbai cinema since 1995, thirty years and counting. Now that you have the grammar, this is the song-and-dance romance at full strength.
Kids: yes.
On Netflix · Rent on Apple TV, Google Play Movies, YouTube
09Sholay (1975)
Two small-time crooks are hired to catch the bandit terrorising a village. A western by way of Bombay, with the most famous villain in Indian cinema, and it ran five years straight in one theatre. Every Hindi film since has quoted it, so this is where you find out you have been hearing its lines all along. Restored in 2025 and looking better than it did in cinemas.
Kids: fine from about 12.
On Tubi Tv · Rent on Amazon Video, Apple TV, Google Play Movies
A peasant woman raises two sons through flood, famine and a moneylender, and pays for her principles at the end. Melodrama at full tilt, in colour, nominated for the Oscar in 1958, and the template for half the films above it on this list. It lives on the Criterion Channel now. Watch it last, because by now you can feel it the way it was meant to be felt.
Kids: fine, it is heavy.
On Eros Now · Rent on Amazon Video, Apple TV, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Fandango at Home
Done with these? Top Rated ranks everything we have scored, and the classics are where the deep end starts.