Home / Sunday-mid-day / / Article /
The Dhurandhar backlash and India’s film review crisis
Updated On: 14 December, 2025 07:51 AM IST | Mumbai | Akshita Maheshwari
...is what film critics are being told. What does it say about the state of “reviewing” in India when opinions of expert voices are pulled down? The chaos after Dhurandhar’s release reveals an ecosystem cracking under orchestrated outrage
Dhurandhar is a spy thriller, which draws inspiration from real-life events involving geopolitical tensions and covert operations conducted by India’s R&AW. It stars Ranveer Singh and Akshaye Khanna
Quick Read
In the days after Dhurandhar detonated at the box office, something darker rippled outward. It was not the film itself, but the reaction to its critics and reviews that became the real spectacle. An online mob decided that disagreement was treason.
Among the first to be hit were the familiar names — reviewers who have, for years, been part of the necessary, often thankless job, of telling India what it should be watching, and sometimes, what it should not see. Suddenly, their reviews — if negative and questioning — were recast as acts of sabotage. But, the final blow came when Anupama Chopra, arguably the most visible film journalist in the country, took down her film review after an unrelenting barrage of abuse. Chopra called Dhurandhar an “exhausting, relentless, and frenzied espionage thriller driven by a heavy dose of testosterone, and shrill nationalism”. She felt the film leaned more on “spectacle and jingoism than on storytelling finesse”. The removal was unprecedented; in her decades-long career, Chopra had never withdrawn a review, not even during earlier cycles of actor fandom toxicity. The disappearance of the video became a kind of Rorschach test for the industry. What was clear is that the act jolted the Film Critics Guild into public action. Within hours, the Guild released an unusually sharp statement condemning the harassment as “targeted, coordinated, and designed to intimidate,” and warning that such attacks were not merely personal but posed a “direct threat to editorial independence”.
Trending Stories
Latest Photos
Latest Videos
Latest Web Stories
ADVERTISEMENT
Mid-Day Fast
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT