Aankhen

The directing debut of Vipul Amrutlal Shah, this Hindi thriller adapts Aatish Kapadia's Gujarati stage play Andhalo Pato. Amitabh Bachchan plays Vijay, a manager who has given his life to a bank and is fired for savagely beating a teller caught embezzling. Plotting revenge, he decides to rob the bank on a simple premise: blind men attract no suspicion. He recruits three blind men, each with his own history of ruin, one who lost both his sight and his entire family in a crash on the way to his own wedding, another tricked by his uncle into donating his eyes as a child. He then blackmails Neha, a teacher at a school for the blind, into training them by abducting her brother. The heist works at first and falls apart once one identity is exposed. A curious detail is the alternative ending prepared for overseas audiences, in which Vijay bribes his way free and leaves behind a menacing warning. The film premiered at an awards ceremony in Malaysia, earned Bachchan a Filmfare nomination for Best Supporting Actor and Paresh Rawal one for Best Comedian, and ranked among the year's higher grossing Hindi films. Who it's for: Fans of star studded 2000s Bollywood heist thrillers. Who it's not for: Not for viewers uneasy about blindness deployed as a plot device, since the film runs on that idea throughout.