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Zeitgeist Films


8.5

based on 15 reviews
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How did we calculate this?

based on 2 votes
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FILM:

MPAA 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.

GENRE(S):	Drama
WRITTEN BY:	Deepa Mehta Bapsi Sidhwa (autobiography Cracking India)
DIRECTED BY:	Deepa Mehta
RELEASE DATE:	Video: October 10, 2000 Theatrical: September 10, 1999
RUNNING TIME:	104 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	Canada / India
LANGUAGE(S):	English / Hindi (with English subtitles)

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.

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.

Chicago Tribune

An extraordinary movie on many levels.

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.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

A powerful and disturbing reminder of how a civilization can suddenly crack under certain pressures.

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.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Told as a melodrama and romance, not docudrama, and that makes it all the more effective.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Hurls its Holocaust at us in a series of justifiably horrific images.

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.

Film.com John Hartl

Gorgeous and troubling.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Sumptuous historical melodrama.

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.

Village Voice Jessica Winter

Mehta feels compelled to twist the screw, shamelessly plying her audience with mawkish tropes wearing the garb of "innocence."

The average user rating for this movie is 8.5 (out of 10) based on 2 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.

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Earth Zeitgeist Films

Earth
Zeitgeist Films