The film revolves around a strong friendship between an Indian doctor, an English woman, who faces a different path when she marries a city judge. It is a story that expresses the course of colonial India one day and provides a vital example in this ideal framework.
Lean's visually appealing film frequently connects as a social satire and a mystical melodrama of transgressors looking for footholds in psychically threatening territory.
Variety
November 06, 2007
An impeccably faithful, beautifully played and occasionally languorous adaptation of E.M. Forster's classic novel.
Epic, briliantly photographed, but slow David Lean drama.
Apollo Guide
April 24, 2008
Regardless of what one thinks of David Lean and his old fashioned style, the results here - save perhaps for the casting of Alec Guinness as a Hindu professor - are exquisite.
EmanuelLevy.Com
March 19, 2008
Lean's swan song is an intelligent adaptation of Forster's complex novel about racil prejudice and sexual repression, flaunting wonderful perfromances from the two leads, Judy Davis and particularly Dame Peggy Ashcroft.
Forster's novel is one of the literary landmarks of this century, and now David Lean has made it into one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen.
Lean isn't on his A-game here, but the film isn't bad.
Chicago Reader
November 06, 2007
David Lean's studied, plodding, overanalytic direction manages to kill most of the meaning in E.M. Forster's haunting novel of cultural collision in colonial India.