There’s a reason why Sholay was the most popular Indian film in the world for decades. If Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch, The Man With No Name Trilogy, Oklahoma!, Enter the Dragon and The Magnificent Seven were all in the same movie, you’d have a sense for the maximalist majesty of Sholay.
Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 dacoit Western epic is a stone classic, now released into the world in a 4K restoration that also reinstates its original ending, censored for five decades. This is a film of many feelings and many genres — all of them, in fact — and its U.S. premiere at the 2025 New York Film Festival was the best experience I had at the movies all last year. It is a symphony of heightened emotion and pure sensation.
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The malevolent bandit Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan) and his gang are on the loose, murdering and pillaging their way in and around the village of Ramgarh. So what other choice does Inspector Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) have but to bring in the most dynamic of duos to handle business? The inspector encountered criminal antiheroes (and absolute legends) Veeru (Dharmendra) and Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) a few years back, and he knows them to have honor and purpose. So we have a triangle of drama, with an imminent collision that’s going to shake things up for everyone.
At no point in making this film was director Ramesh Sippy content to coast. Every scene is perfectly rooted in the story, and is freed to flourish with the cast and crew. Sholay is not content to rest on its laurels. Even the moments that radiate hangout vibes and some joking around are part of the construction of this epic story, and it’s built with care, gathering strength as it barrels along. There’s a sequence in this film that starts like Jacques Demy and ends like Sam Peckinpah, with the colors of the Holi festival becoming the colors of a massacre among the earth tones, and it delivers everything you could want from the movies.
No stranger to the wildest of Westerns, the late, great H.G. Webb — the recently departed cinephile and Belcourt booster — would have loved this film.
