Lenin movie review: Akhil Akkineni’s village drama wears its Kurukshetra on its sleeve | Movie-review News
Lenin movie review and rating: Long before cinema existed, the Mahabharata gave Indian storytelling its most durable blueprint for tragedy: two people bound by love and duty, forced onto opposite sides of a conflict neither of them chose. Telugu filmmakers have leaned on that blueprint for decades, but few recent films embrace it as openly as Lenin does. Rather than treating the epic as a passing metaphor, director Murali Kishor Abburu builds his entire village universe around it, using the real-life Bharatham Jatara, a week-long festival rooted in the legend of Draupadi Amman, as the literal and symbolic battlefield on which his characters’ loyalties are tested. It’s an ambitious choice, and for most of its runtime, the film earns the comparison it’s reaching for. The film opens in 1976 in Srirampuram, a fictional village in Andhra Pradesh, where a young orphan boy wanders in and is taken in by the village head’s family. That boy grows into Lenin, played by Akhil Akkineni, and his life becomes tightly interwoven with two people: Vasanth, the elder son …
