Summer for the City Outdoor Film Series - RRR

Film at Lincoln Center and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts announce this summer’s free Outdoor Film Series lineup, part of LCPA’s Summer for the City. This year’s series, curated by FLC, will be hosted entirely on the big screen in Damrosch Park, with ample seating and on-site concessions.

S.S. Rajamouli, 2022, India, 187m
English and Telugu with English subtitles

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.