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

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

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

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

Not for literary purists, but if you like your entertainment well tailored, then feel the quality and the width.

| Jun 24, 2006

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.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 23, 2004

The film is very much 'a full theatrical meal,' and one that conveys a lot of 'the multiplicity of life' one seldom sees on the screen these days.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 20, 2003