Telugu Cinema in 2023: The five best films and the five biggest letdowns

What: This is a year defined by various strands emerging from within Telugu cinema complicating any reductive reading—indie dramas rooted in rural Telangana broke through with Balagam and Pareshan, mass films attempted to be more experimental with form— Salaar: Part 1 – Ceasefire and Dasara, even big star-vehicles like Bhagwant Kesari and Waltair Veerayya were forced to take the hero down a peg in order to keep the genre relevant.

Furthermore:  The most interesting facet was the return of the romance—the success of films like Sita Ramam last year and Hi Nanna this year perhaps indicates a resurgence in the popular consciousness of a genre that acknowledges something beyond male fantasies and anxieties, a tendency which has defined and circumscribed popular Telugu cinema for too long. A film like Miss Shetty Mister Polishetty stood out precisely because it managed to center an independent woman who refuses to be circumscribed by patriarchy. There was also Nandini Reddy’s Anni Manchi Sakunamule, which featured a woman working to solve her family’s financial troubles as its protagonist. 2023 also saw the debut of a female filmmaker (woefully underrepresented in Telugu cinema)—Puja Kolluru, with Martin Luther King, a remake of the Tamil film Mandela (2021).

We heard:  The media state that these films took steps towards changing one of the foundational assumptions of mainstream Telugu cinema—that the viewer being addressed is de facto male.

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