10 recent Indian movies to watch after RRR

polygon.com:

With its recent encore release and streaming premiere, S.S. Rajamouli’s Telugu-language blockbuster RRR is proving to be a gateway drug for American viewers eager to watch more Indian cinema. That category may be broad — India has dozens of different film industries, each with their own languages and sensibilities — but there are plenty of classic and contemporary entry points available to stream. The Criterion Channel has several works by legendary directors like Satyajit Ray and Guru Dutt, while Netflix features multiple versions of Rajamouli’s Baahubali movies, a pair of sword-and-sandal epics on a mythological scale, for anyone interested in additional servings of his specific cuisine.

Crafting a list of recommendations that feels remotely complete or all-encompassing is a Herculean task, given India’s sheer volume of cinematic output (around two thousand films a year), so any such rundown is likely to be influenced by whims, preferences, and even gaps in your knowledge. That said, it also feels in line with the joyous spirit of RRR to share a list of personal favorites from recent years, whether they conform to Rajamouli’s over-the-top, maximalist aesthetic or swing in the opposite direction entirely.

These 10 films belong to various industries — none of which are Bollywood, the mainstream Hindi-language industry, which takes up enough conversational oxygen as it is — but they run the stylistic gamut, and paint a more complete picture of the many avenues of Indian cinema still left to explore.

One of the easiest films to recommend to a newly-minted Rajamouli fan is his ludicrously fun insect action thriller Eega. Reincarnation dramas are a dime a dozen in Indian cinema (they date back to at least the 1940s), but