Despite the grim and brooding background, Zhivago has a surging buoyant spirit that is unquenchable. Doctor Zhivago is more than a masterful motion picture; it is a life experience.

| Dec 22, 2016

One of those rare film adaptations which, unless you have already read the book, makes you wonder why anyone ever bothered to make the film at all.

| Apr 29, 2016

Maurice Jarre's music is as beguiling as ever and Lean squeezes all the pathos that he can out of the romance between Sharif's Yuri Zhivago and Julie Christie's febrile and gorgeous Lara Antipova.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 1, 2015

Epic seems too small a word for the sweeping ambition and romance of Doctor Zhivago.

| Dec 1, 2015

Lean and Bolt pay tribute to a Tolstoyan ambition in Pasternak's samizdat novel, and also to a real contemporary relevance: the story of a suppressed writer.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 26, 2015

Demands everything from the viewer while offering little in return, with Lean coming across like a despised schoolmaster not wanting to open himself up to his braying students.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 26, 2015

Yes it's old-fashioned and sappy. But it's impossible not to swoon.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 24, 2015

Literate, oldfashioned, soul-filling and thoroughly romantic.

| Aug 24, 2008

David Lean's 1965 adaptation of Pasternak's romance of the Russian Revolution is intelligent and handsomely mounted, though it doesn't use its length to build to a particularly complex emotional effect.

| Aug 13, 2007

One of the most meticulously designed and executed films.

| Aug 13, 2007

Steiger and Courtenay excepted, all the performances are very uncomfortable.

Full Review | Jan 26, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 7, 2005

Mr. Bolt has reduced the vast upheaval of the Russian Revolution to the banalities of a doomed romance.

| May 20, 2003

Lean's last great film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 17, 2001

Although its portentous historical drama evaporates once you return to the fresh air, watching it can be seductive.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Lean discovered, and fell in love with, Julie Christie, and knew straightaway that his audience would too.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 1, 2000

The movie is something that should be experienced by everyone at least once in a lifetime.

| Jan 1, 2000