A Passage to India still lives up to the hype some 40 years later.

| Sep 18, 2024

David Lean's last film -- after a 14-year break -- was seen as a return to form. But it's an odd, sprawling work with an epic backdrop but a pinched sense of storytelling.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 22, 2024

The novel wants to be about unresolvability; the movie doesn’t, and isn’t. What’s remarkable about the film is how two such different temperaments as Forster’s and Lean’s could come together.

| Sep 13, 2023

David Lean's adaptation of E.M. For- ster's great Anglo-Indian novel is, for a great deal of its 2 1/2-hours running time, an exceptionally fine and civilized movie, almost a great one.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 19, 2023

I find it solvent and very moving, populated by contagious characters and that characteristic visual style of Lean that captivates my eye when it illustrates the beautiful Indian landscapes for almost three hours. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 20, 2021

By the foreseeable conclusion, it's too late to save the project from its place amongst well-intentioned, immensely mediocre moviemaking.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Sep 6, 2020

It is a disappointing signpost to what lies ahead. Lean swiftly turns the narrative into a melodrama of social and sexual unease.

| Feb 10, 2020

Like the novel, Lean's meditative, graceful film laments and marvels at the mysteries of human behavior.

| Sep 30, 2019

Certainly it is important to have films which document historical oppression. But this can - and should - be accomplished in a way that does not pit one oppressed group against another.

| Aug 21, 2019

The spirit of the book has vanished and its strange music cannot be heard. The movie is lovely but earthbound.

| Jun 15, 2018

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 86/100 | Apr 24, 2008

Lean's visually appealing film frequently connects as a social satire and a mystical melodrama of transgressors looking for footholds in psychically threatening territory.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 21, 2008

Lean isn't on his A-game here, but the film isn't bad.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 17, 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.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 19, 2008

Epic, briliantly photographed, but slow David Lean drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 8, 2008

Lean does an excellent job of conveying the repressive nature of British society captured in the novel.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 6, 2007

The film, for all Lean's innate elegance, is strangely remote and unmoving. It could easily have been a Merchant-Ivory film.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 6, 2007

While the storytelling is rather toothless, A Passage to India is certainly well worth watching for fans of the director's epic style.

| Nov 6, 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.

| Nov 6, 2007

An impeccably faithful, beautifully played and occasionally languorous adaptation of E.M. Forster's classic novel.

| Nov 6, 2007