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

These films took steps towards changing one of the foundational assumptions of mainstream Telugu cinema—that the viewer being addressed is de facto male. And yet, this is also a year in which films like Baby evoked misogynistic reactions in theatres.

What follows, then, is an assortment picked from what can charitably be described as a mixed bag of a year.

The Best Telugu Films of 2023

Month of Madhu

My favourite edit in a film this year is a hard cut in Month of Madhu—a teenage Lekha (Swathi Reddy) is sitting on the ledge of her kitchen as her mom is cooking, needling her, being annoying in a way only endearing when it comes from a teenager. We can sense that the irreverent spark in her, which her family is indifferent to, comes from her being in love with the hot-headed Madhusudhan. And then we get the cut—to a Lekha now twenty years older, feeding her ageing mother, who has lost her ability to speak. This Lekha looks weary, her marriage with Madhusudhan has collapsed due to his abusive streak, life has defaulted on the promises it made her in her youth, and she has to build a new life after shedding the one she built with Madhusudan when they were young. This isn’t a perfect film, but it carries a sense of what time erodes within us as its waves wash over us (the sea is a recurring visual motif) and how the wide-eyed wonder and naivete of youth is not always rewarded by life and its unfurling.

Balagam

The word balagam translates to “kith and kin”, and its phonological similarity to balam (strength) is a hint at what the film is really about. What made Balagam the biggest indie success in Telugu cinema this year, apart from Priyadarshi Pullikonda’s fantastic turn in the lead role, is its cultural specificity. Telangana films have emerged as a force to reckon with after the bifurcation, and Balagam is emblematic of this movement—it is a comedy-drama in which both the comedic and dramatic registers are articulated through the cultural particulars of rural Telangana. The film is about how Sailu (Priyadarshi) and his family deal with the consequences of his grandfather’s passing. The ceremonies involved in the funeral of the patriarch constitute the spine of the film—folk ballads sung as part of these give voice to the emotional currents of the film, and the writer-director of the film, Venu Yeldandi gives one of the best comic performances of the year as a guilt-stricken tailor.

Dasara

Nani-starrer Dasara draws much of its power from the cultural specifics of Godavarikhani and the coal mines of Singareni, and yet, unlike Balagam, this is a mass film—albeit an unusual one for Telugu cinema. For one, its politics seems to resemble that of Pa. Ranjith and Sukumar’s recent work. And then there is the visual finesse on display in so many memorable sequences—the riveting, bloody, pre-intermission sequence, the visually sumptuous “Ori Vaari” in which the night sky is illuminated by dancing shafts of light from miner’s helmets, the action spectacle of the eponymous Dasara festival in its finale. There is also Santhosh Narayan’s fabulous soundtrack. You get the feeling that the film is pulling its punches politically towards the end, and it doesn’t all work as well as it should. But this is still the most striking mass film of the year, and a debut Srikanth Odela should be proud of.

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Hi Nanna

The word melodrama has come to be used as a pejorative over the past few decades, and yet so many of the greatest stories in human history—Oedipus Rex, Sati Savitri, Heer Ranjha, and Laila Majnun operate in this register. Indian cinema, particularly popular Indian cinema, has perhaps done melodrama better than any other cinema in the world—and one of the best exponents of this has been Mani Ratnam. Hi Nanna is a Mani Ratnam pastiche—there are fragments of Geethanjali, Anjali, and Kannathil Muthamittal all thrown in—and yet, unlike this year’s Kushi, it channels the spirit of these films rather than reference them explicitly and awkwardly. There is a winning romance at the heart of this drama about parenthood and its charm alone makes you forgive some of its more egregious contrivances and the somewhat fuzzy writing of its heroine.

Keedaa Cola

Tharun Bhaskar has a gift for dialogue that is comparable perhaps only to Trivikram Srinivas and Jandhyala. At his best, he manages to marry this to a fabulous cinematic verve: watch how he frames a negotiation in this year’s crime-comedy Keedaa Cola like a standoff in a Sergio Leone western, and how he doffs his hat to Edgar Wright and Guy Ritchie with a precise use of slow motion, lensing, and montages. Keedaa Cola eventually runs out of steam and shrivels into farce—it never becomes something more than the sum of its parts, but it is still a rarity thanks to the director’s unique sensibilities, his ability to tap into the grammar of several genres, and also to Vivek Sagar’s (who is surely emerging as one of the best in the country at what he does) score. That the best performance in this film comes from the director in a starring role shouldn’t really come as a surprise, but it’s his signature behind the camera that distinguishes Keedaa Cola from so many of the films that came out this year.

The Biggest Telugu Letdowns of 2023

Rather than list the worst films of the year, I thought that it would be more instructive to look at the ones that had promise—the disappointments, rather than the ones that didn’t even try (think Bholaa Shankar, Veera Simha Reddy, Skanda).

Kushi

Shiva Nirvana’s Kushi begins well—Vijay Deverakonda is back to playing a naive goofball reminiscent of his turn in Pelli Choopulu, and his comic timing as a Telugu man trying to speak Hindi while courting Samantha is on the money. But then the plot kicks off and the film begins an enormously frustrating drama in which his atheistic family (which is commie-coded and yet have a picture of right-wing capitalist Ayn Rand in their house, for some reason) faces off against her religious one. While the film references relevant TV personalities and debates, it squanders the chance to genuinely engage the politics of its subject matter—something Ante Sundaraniki managed to do splendidly last year—and instead reduces its idealogues to squabbling children without producing compelling dramatic conflict. Perhaps its most egregious fault is that it fails to provide any interiority or sense of personhood to its heroine and that a pivotal plot point involving pregnancy and miscarriage is handled with astounding ignorance. This is a film that references almost the entirety of Mani Ratnam’s filmography (even going as far as having a song with lyrics such as naa Roja nuvve, na Dil Se nuvve), and yet carries little understanding of what makes his films tick.

Baby

It would seem from Sai Rajesh’s statements that Baby was intended to be something of a tragedy of errors in which three people who have fallen for each other hurt each other—and yet, how is one meant to read a film which ends with Anand Devarakonda telling Vaishnavi Chaitanya that he wished women like her came with a warning sign from God as she begs him for his forgiveness—a film whose closing shot is a quote on the rear of the male lead’s autorikshaw that translates to, “It is better to burn at the funeral pyre than to be crushed by a woman?” This is a film which has its young female lead make illogical decisions which it tries to pass off as immaturity—and juxtaposes her going to pubs, her going on dates, and her being coerced into sex against the innocence and the suffering of the male partner, inviting a reading of her coming-of-age as a journey into moral corruption. Filmmakers can’t always be held responsible for reactions that their films elicit, especially when those reactions stem from bad faith interpretations. And yet, there is the question of what Baby does to dissuade this reading. As misogynistic reactions of male audiences across theatres in the Telugu states did the rounds on social media following its release, I wondered what its success portends for Telugu cinema.

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Bro

Pawan Kalyan isn’t the problem in Bro (he plays a personification of Time!), Samuthirakani’s remake of his 2021 Tamil supernatural comedy-drama Vinodhaya Sitham. If you get his appeal—his unconventional, malleable performance of hero-masculinity—the parts where the film stops its plot to pay homage to him shouldn’t really bother you. But then you remember that this is a film written by Trivikram Srinivas—and a high-concept film written by him starring Pawan Kalyan has no excuse to be this lazy. This a film that frequently seems uninterested in a plot that it goes to great lengths to set up. Very few of the jokes land, and much of the film floats by as you progressively lower your standards. Bro is another star vehicle that relies on its references to other, better films of the star it is busy worshipping. What will it take to get one of those instead?

Shaakuntalam

Samantha Ruth Prabhu is a bonafide star, and it should tell you something about the film that even she can’t render this mythological epic watchable. Shaakuntalam was an opportunity to have a female-led epic with a sweeping romance at its core, instead of hypermasculine violence. It was helmed by Gunasekhar, the man who gave us one of the greatest masala films ever made, Okkadu—a film which managed to have a gentle romance blossom atop the Charminar in one of the most iconic images in Telugu cinema. Shaakunthalam doesn’t feel like an epic, nor does it feel like a romance—in the throes of passion, the hero confesses his love to the heroine by telling her how he would like to be reborn through her, by impregnating her. But it isn’t the archaic gender politics, the bad acting, or even the lackluster wannabe-Disney CGI that prove to be fatal—rather, it’s the lack of an artistic vision that can mould cinema from the raw materials that are at the filmmaker’s disposal. Shaakunthalam feels like being invited to a house-warming ceremony and arriving to find a pile of bricks and a barrel of cement.

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Tiger Nageshwar Rao

Tiger Nageshwar Rao deals with an important chapter in Andhra Pradesh’s history—that of the marginalized communities of Stuartpuram whose identity was criminalized under the British Raj. It decides to tell this story by making the misguided decision to play into the worst stereotypes of “tribal” people in the first half—even going as far as to have its hero behave lecherously and misogynistically—only to subvert it in the second half. This is a film that has some political platitudes but can’t unfurl them into convictions—opting to be KGF and Pushpa at the same time. There is some good production design here, and Ravi Teja is in good form. It is far from the worst masala film of the year—but given the promise of its subject matter and some of the evident effort in its production, it deserved to be much better.