Team FC
One of the most original 'horror' films to emerge from the derivative shackles of Bollywood, Kaun? was conceived by a landscape-altering Ram Gopal Verma at his most daring and versatile
Director Chandraprakash Dwivedi can be a divisive film-maker, but he has been a culturally astute storyteller. Never has this been more apparent in the period drama Pinjar, an uneven portrait of Partition that might have been labelled as a toxic Stockholm-syndrome-sympathizing love story by today's woke brigade.
Bajpayee's character dies in the first act of Abhishek Chaubey's Sonchiriya, but his spirit remains embedded in the ravines of the 1970s-set dacoit film.
In a role that can best be described as a hybrid of Sunny Deol's Angry Young Man and Nana Patekar's Angsty Young Man, Bajpayee taps his Bihari roots and infuses the honest-cop stereotype with tremendous grit and middle-class texture for the Ram Gopal Varma-written crime drama.
Arguably the actor's most physical performance comes in the form of a retired Maharashtrian police constable living in a Mumbai chawl.
Raj & DK's hit Amazon series straddles so many genres at once – action, social satire, espionage thriller, slice-of-life dramedy, morality drama – that it organically allows for a Greatest Hits Mixtape of Manoj Bajpayee.
Just as Satya isn't a movie so much as a lexicon of the Mumbai gangster epic, Bhiku Mhatre isn't a character so much as a time on the clock of the city's cinematic language.
In an ambitious meta-physical drama that draws parallels between the cramped geography of Old Delhi and the dusty insides of a protagonist's head, Manoj Bajpayee delivers a masterclass as a crumbling character who is both a person and a place at once.
While Prakash Jha's Rajneeti (2010) and Aarakshan (2011) are officially considered to be Bajpayee's comeback after years in Bollywood's neither-hero-nor-character-actor wilderness, it's Anurag Kashyap's two-part crime epic that actually marked the actor's return to the upper echelons.
There's something about Manoj Bajpayee playing ageing, persecuted and defeated men – he lends disgrace the dignity of loss, and tragedy the gingerly grandeur of an underdog story.