India, March 16 -- Essential Malayalam movies: For decades now, Malayalam cinema has enjoyed a reputation as India's most inventive film industry, and rightly so. It has stories that are imbued with a sense of humanity. The outcome has been a film culture where characters feel startlingly real and the most mundane lives are capable of spinning into the most extraordinary of stories. Here are the best Malayalam movies to watch if you are new to them.

In recent years, that reputation has spread far beyond Kerala's borders. You can thank social media and advent of streaming services for that. Viewers find themselves with the same question: how did this industry manage to fly so far under the radar for so long? And it all too often begins wi...