Karan Arjun

Two brothers, Karan and Arjun, killed in their village by a tyrannical relative, are reborn in other bodies through the prayers of their mother Durga. For years she has said her sons will return and nobody believes her. The two grow up in different cities without knowing each other. Then they begin to remember. The film is not interested in reincarnation. It is interested in a mother's insistence: what carries it is not the brothers but Durga's stubbornness, which everyone calls madness, and her being right in the end. Its most famous line belongs to that expectation. The form is nineties Indian melodrama: the village square, songs, long fights and large emotional detonations. Rakesh Roshan directed. The film was among India's biggest earners of 1995 and one of the few to put Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan together; both were rising separately at the time and their pairing determined the box office directly. Rakhee Gulzar plays Durga and Amrish Puri the tyrannical relative. Puri's villain is a classic of its kind. Who it is for: viewers who like nineties Indian melodrama and want the two Khans together. Who it is not for: anyone looking for logic. The plot rests entirely on belief, the second half repeats itself and the violence is overblown.