Critic Reviews
| 91 |
Entertainment Weekly
Even blood, spilled so freely, has a distinctive intensity of red in this beautiful and harrowing film.
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| 90 |
LA Weekly
Both visually and emotionally, a panoramic picture; Mehta wields a master's hand as she weaves together vistas of urban and pastoral India with thoughts on the nature of man as it keeps cycling out in the specifics of history.
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| 88 |
Chicago Tribune
An extraordinary movie on many levels.
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| 88 |
New York Post
A remarkable accomplishment. It takes one of the century's vast tragedies...and makes it heart-rendingly real and intimate.
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| 80 |
Film.com
Mehta's latest release, combines a similarly intoxicating visual immediacy and delight with a sobering outsider's long view.
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| 80 |
The New York Times
A powerful and disturbing reminder of how a civilization can suddenly crack under certain pressures.
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| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
It's a passionate, beautifully mounted film -- but the agenda she sets for herself is too large and the conflicts she portrays too complicated to be illustrated in a single drama.
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| 75 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Told as a melodrama and romance, not docudrama, and that makes it all the more effective.
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| 75 |
Boston Globe
Hurls its Holocaust at us in a series of justifiably horrific images.
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| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
Telling things through the eyes of a spoiled, precocious, troublemaking 8-year-old narrator is both an overdone device and not a particularly engaging one.
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| 70 |
Film.com
Gorgeous and troubling.
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| 60 |
TV Guide
Sumptuous historical melodrama.
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| 58 |
Portland Oregonian
A draggy affair livened occasionally by bursts of color or raw emotion, but just as often convoluted and hackneyed. It's a case of a film taking on, admirably, more than it can chew.
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| 50 |
Chicago Reader
Unfortunately the allegory tends to overpower the characterizations even as it deepens them.
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| 40 |
Village Voice
Mehta feels compelled to twist the screw, shamelessly plying her audience with mawkish tropes wearing the garb of "innocence."
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