Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983)

Two hapless photographers in Bombay stumble on a murder that links a crooked builder, a crooked municipal commissioner and a crooked newspaper editor, and spend the rest of the film being outmanoeuvred by all three. Kundan Shah's 1983 film is India's best-loved satire of graft, and a cult classic after a modest first run. The climax, in which everyone hijacks an amateur staging of the Mahabharata, is one of the great farce sequences in any language. It helps to know that bridges, contracts and press favours were the currency of the era, but the comedy explains itself.