Zoya Akhtar's journey as a director in the Hindi film industry has had four key milestones, each represented by her feature films: Luck by Chance (2009), Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011), Dil Dhadakne Do (2015) and Gully Boy (2019). Until the release of Gully Boy, most mainstream reviews of Akhtar’s films criticised her focus on telling stories of affluent people and their ‘firstworld’ problems. The popular narrative of the critics’ opinion was premised on the constant interactions between the story of the films and their nouveau riche characters. She has also been criticised for using her industry network to get big film stars on her projects and that even as a woman filmmaker, her focus is on men's stories.

The broad themes of the popular reviews in English of Akhtar's films, in our opinion, are oversimplified assertions, if not exactly reductionist. What adds to this reductionism is that as one of the few female filmmakers in the industry working on big budget, mainstream productions, Akhtar is forced to face certain expectations that her male counterparts are not. Any filmmaker who has attempted to tell complex stories of the film industry, male bonding and the hypocrisy of the urban elite, with a deep understanding of the audience and the marketplace, certainly deserves an engagement at a more nuanced level.

This chapter, therefore, conducts a critical discourse analysis of the popular criticism of Akhtar's directorial ventures by combining an analysis of Akhtar’s films’ reviews with our interviews with select film reviewers and critics in India. These film reviews and reviewers have been limited to English-language newspapers, magazines, websites and the reviewers thereof, respectively. Consequently, film reviews written in and reviewers writing in other languages have not been the focus of this study. This chapter discusses the perceptions of a successful woman filmmaker in the Indian context, especially in comparison to her male counterparts, where the pressure to tell a story in a certain manner may possibly be a function of her gender and lineage. This chapter is particularly significant as professional film reviewers have not been studied in this way and an engagement of this nature in the professional film review landscape in India is inherently missing. This contextualisation also provides an anchoring point for a much-needed academic reflection.