From Sita Ramam to RRR to Major, here are the best Telugu films of 2022

This was an explosive year for Telugu cinema with blockbusters like RRR, Major, and _Sita Ramam_ . Here’s revisiting the best of 2022 the industry offered the globe. Sita Ramam: This giddy headed romantic drama is based on the fairytale idealized version of love rather than a more practical offshoot of the emotion that we see in cinema today and in real life as well. Ram, played by the very genial Dulquer Salmaan, is a soldier fighting a war against war-time killings on the border in 1964 , when in a flashback we are told Ram rescued his Sita (Mrunal Thakur) during a sudden breakout of communal riots. Once we buy into the plot’s glorious guilelessness it all becomes an easy breezy ride especially since Dulquer Salman who did two very dark film Kurup and Salute this year, and one very airy lighthearted silly froth broth Hey Sinamika, here treads into romantic territory with a blithe passion. He is goofy but never flippant, passionate but never over-concentrated. He knows when to rein in and when to let go.A skill that the film itself is not very adept at. Even so, Sita Ramam has a lot to offer. It is a visual feast, and my compliments to the art director , and the cinematographers P. S. Vinod and Shreyaas Krishna who extend an exhilarating beauty to almost every frame. RRR: This is three hours of non-stop hecticity. Rajamouli wants every frame to exhale a breath of flushed air. It’s all about size. And those who think otherwise are not familiar with the Rajamouli school of thought. His cinematic vision is many sizes larger than what an average blockbuster builder of Bollywood imagines to be epic in scope. There are many extraordinary action sequences in RRR. Come to think of it , _RRR_ is short of drama and emotions. Bullets and arrows fly from all directions while our two heroes do a Jai and Veeru from Sholay including of course a dosti song. But it is bereft of an emotional bedrock. In this conspicuous absence, the narrative chooses the path of choreographed action as the only panacea to kill the looming sense of lopsidedness in the plot. The women including Alia Bhatt are just faint sketches while the even the minor male characters(like Bheem’s comrade in arms) are given a prominent place in the plot. Virata Parvam: Venu Udugula’s film is very tough to dismiss as propaganda for Naxalism. It seems so much more, thanks to Sai Pallavi’s incandescent presence. Set in the 1990s it blatantly romanticizes the Naxal movement, making the participants in the cut-throat movement look like champions of the downtrodden , which they probably were to begin with. And making the police force seem like the hub of brutality and injustice. Which probably was the case in the initial stages of the Naxal movement. But then the movements lost focus. Not this swooning film, though. It spins an incredibly unlikely story of a girl from a village of Andhra Vennella ( Sai Pallavi ) who follows her Naxalite hero Ravi Shankar(Rana Daggubati) into her ruination. To the lovelorn Vennella she is Ravi Shankar’s Radha and he is her radicalized Krishna. Sai Pallavi, the most natural-born actress I have seen since Jaya Bhaduri, is capable of elevating the most obnoxious script. In Virata Parvam, she is delightfully naïve and infuriatingly stubborn, determined to follow her man’s ideology to her doom. Sai’s journey from her father’s beloved daughter to her beloved’s blindfaithed follower is so kosher, it sort of makes you want to forgive the narrative’s excessive zeal to humanize acts of violence just because …well… it was fashionable at one time to favour fascism. Ammu: Charukesh Sekar’s film deep-dives into the disease of domestic violence, and comes up with disturbing images of a dark unspoken tragedy which is sadly the truth behind many seemingly peaceful marriages. Ammu rips open the happy-home façade, to expose the ugly truth within. Aishwarya Lekshmi is a coiled-up powerhouse in this hardhitting ,in more than one, film about abuse and its aftermath. Lekshmi wraps her persona around her character, owning both its pain and guilt, creating a space for the suffering wife that allows her to manoeuvre her way through the marital morass. In the later part of the narrative the film turns into a marital revenge drama where Sleeping With The Enemy meets Darlings , and not in a very smooth way. What the film focuses on is Ammu’s paranoia : she never knows when the next blow, would come and why. The bond of empathy that Ammu forms with the women around her could have been explored a little more closely. What remains with us is a film that wants us to empathize with Ammu’s pain but not with her guilt. Her journey from an abused wife to an avenging angel may not be smooth. But the jagged edges in the narration only adds to the feeling of a drama being played out in real life. Major: Director Shashi Kiran Tikka succeeds y in giving us another memorable war-hero epic after Shershaah. This is the story of Major Sandeep Unnikishnan who perished while trying to save lives in the 26/11 attack on the Taj. A remarkably accomplished sound design and Vamsi Patchipulusu’s unadorned but deeply empathic cinematography gives to the narrative the mood and texture of lived-in immediacy as viewed through luminous lenses. Adivi Sesh nails the character with his outstanding body language .The sheer joy he experiences in playing such a heroic character shines through in nearly every frame. In the action scenes, he is every inch the committed never-say-die commando. Miraculously he carries off the earlier portions as a schoolboy with aplomb. Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. 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