RRR

Enter to win a pair of Opening Night tickets to the 62nd New York Film Festival at our free outdoor film series this summer! Stop by the FLC table near the entrance to enter.

In the summer of 2022, Telugu-language cinema was thrust into the American pop-cultural limelight thanks to the unprecedented box office success of RRR, S.S. Rajamouli’s 1920-set action blockbuster, which charts an imaginary friendship between real-life anti-colonial revolutionaries Komaram Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao, Jr.), a leader of India’s marginalized Gond tribe, and A. Rama Raju (Ram Charan), an officer of the Indian Imperial Police with mysterious personal objectives. Described in Film Comment as “preposterously entertaining,” the film toggles between registers, alternating the good-humored buoyancy and warmth of a classic buddy comedy with the earnest emotional and metaphorical intensity of mythically inflected melodrama. Rajamouli expertly deploys these tonal dynamics in service of an extraordinary cinematic spectacle, which dazzles on the big screen thanks to its sweeping, inventively choreographed and masterfully edited action sequences—plus the showstopping dance number “Naatu Naatu,” for which composer M.M. Keeravani became the first Indian artist to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song.