K.G.F: Chapter 1

Rocky rises as a gunman in Bombay, but his childhood begins in Karnataka. His mother takes one promise from him as she dies: die rich. Years later he is sent to the Kolar Gold Fields on a contract killing. What he finds there is not a mine but a prison camp: thousands of people digging gold at gunpoint, with no word getting out. Before he finds the man he came to kill, Rocky decides to take over the mine itself. The film never tries for realism; it builds its hero as a legend, and the story is relayed from a book written about him. The visual language is dark, built on dust and the colour of gold, with almost no daylight in it. Prashanth Neel wrote and directed. Yash plays Rocky, with Srinidhi Shetty, Anant Nag and Ramachandra Raju in the cast. Hombale Films produced. It opened on 21 December 2018 in Kannada along with Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi. Made for eight hundred million rupees, it became the first Kannada film to pass one billion, and its worldwide total went above two and a half billion rupees. Who it is for: anyone who likes loud Indian action and hero narratives. Who it is not for: anyone looking for realism. The story is constantly broken by flashbacks, the female character has almost no function, and the film openly prepares its second part.