I enjoyed Andhadhun a lot too. I’d say it’s quite different from most Indian cinema. I love these new Indian movies that blend Western cinema influences with stories and characters that are purely Indian. It makes for a very entertaining mixture.
I can’t believe you recommended Bollywood movies to a newcomer and didn’t list Lagaan.
That was my first Bollywood movie way back when and it set the bar very high. It’s also on Netflix, at least in the UK. Is it not available in the US?
I personally didn’t like Lagaan. I know it’s well regarded. It goes a little heavy into Cricket. Not only that, I’m a casual watcher of Cricket all my life, and Lagaan pointed out Cricket rules that I’d never heard of.
Just wanted to drop in to note that Haider is still on Netflix. I don’t have anything like a strong grounding in Bollywood but I bounced off a couple early on and Haider is the first movie that made me rethink this. It’s a really interesting reworking of Hamlet into the context of the Kashmiri conflict, and there’s a really badass dance number when the Hamlet-analogue is accusing his uncle that has stuck with me over the months. (The propensity for randomly going into song-and-dance mode was the thing that most turned me off about those preceding movies, but here it’s limited, mostly diegetic, and really well integrated.)