DVD
Upcoming Release Calendar
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Best / Worst of the Decade
Recent DVD/Video Releases
60
9
xx
Across the Hall
56
Adam
37
Amelia
73
Amreeka
35
Babysitters, The
70
Big Fan
57
Boys Are Back, The
81
Bright Star![]()
71
Bronson
60
Brothers at War
55
Brothers Bloom, The
45
Burning Plain, The
xx
Carriers
64
Che
57
Chelsea on the Rocks
66
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
23
Couples Retreat
54
Dare
68
Departures
19
Downloading Nancy
55
Endgame
39
Fame
30
Final Destination, The
27
Gamer
50
Give Me Your Hand
46
Halloween II
73
House of the Devil, The
94
Hurt Locker, The![]()
55
I Can Do Bad All By Myself
17
I Hate Valentine's Day
26
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
83
In the Loop![]()
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
41
Little Ashes
80
Lorna's Silence
33
Love Happens
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
xx
Ministers, The
67
Moon
59
More Than a Game
49
New York, I Love You
66
No Impact Man
47
Ong Bak 2: The Beginning
28
Pandorum
68
Paranormal Activity
85
Passing Strange![]()
63
Perfect Getaway, A
44
Peter and Vandy
54
Pontypool
35
Post Grad
30
Saw VI
79
Serious Man, A
36
Serious Moonlight
76
Soul Power
40
Spiral
39
St. Trinian's
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
47
Time Traveler's Wife
43
Tru Loved
61
Trucker
47
Weather Girl
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Earth

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 15 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 4 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
Deepa Mehta
Bapsi Sidhwa (autobiography Cracking India)
Directed by: Deepa Mehta
Release Date:
Theatrical: September 10, 1999
Running Time: 104 minutes, Color
Origin: Canada / India
Language(s): English / Hindi (with English subtitles)
Summary
RATING: Not rated
Starring Nandita Das, Kitu Gidwani, Asmir Kahn, and Rahul Khanna
A group of diverse Indian friends and two men after one woman is torn apart by the 1947 partitioning of India. The woman in question (Das) is a nanny who is, with her eight-year-old charge (Sethna), insulated by her Parsi family's wealth and neutrality from the violence erupting around her.
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Bollywood/Hollywood Fire Water
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Even blood, spilled so freely, has a distinctive intensity of red in this beautiful and harrowing film.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Hazel-Dawn Dumpert
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.
Read Full Review >New York Post Jonathan Foreman
A remarkable accomplishment. It takes one of the century's vast tragedies...and makes it heart-rendingly real and intimate.
Film.com Gemma Files
Mehta's latest release, combines a similarly intoxicating visual immediacy and delight with a sobering outsider's long view.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
A powerful and disturbing reminder of how a civilization can suddenly crack under certain pressures.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann
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.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Told as a melodrama and romance, not docudrama, and that makes it all the more effective.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Jay Carr
Hurls its Holocaust at us in a series of justifiably horrific images.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
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.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
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.
Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector
Unfortunately the allegory tends to overpower the characterizations even as it deepens them.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Jessica Winter
Mehta feels compelled to twist the screw, shamelessly plying her audience with mawkish tropes wearing the garb of "innocence."
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 9.2 (out of 10) based on 4 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Ariel S. gave it a10:
Fire, brimestone, and terror reign in this movie.
Keith K. gave it a7:
An excellent movie about the break-up of India in 1947. Musical sound track haunting.
