simple, but not a simplistic, and it is hardly a romanticized paean to childhood, although there are moments of great beauty that remind us how wonderful the world can be when it is stripped of the weight of social responsibility

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 27, 2024

The film proves to be, rather like The Old Man and the Sea, an artfully devised tribute to the human spirit. The black-and-white camera work is both a joy in itself and a sensitive instrument in carrying out the director’s purposes.

| Aug 24, 2023

It's a truly amazing accomplishment which Hollywood and its mass- production thinking could well ponder on.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 13, 2022

Pather Panchali is a film of unusual distinction. Written and directed by Satyajit Roy it has an effective and occasionally humorous musical score by Ravi Shankar. The cinematography by Subrata Mitra is in key with the moody tones of the story.

| Aug 17, 2022

The opening of the story has the time-sense of childhood, that period when tiny happenings are as urgent as great ones, when some trivial incident, a letter, a train passing, the wind singing in a telegraph-pole, can seem to last eternally.

| Aug 8, 2022

Everything about Pather Panchali... points to the beautiful life of the human spirit.

| Aug 8, 2022

It is most simple, most down to earth, and from the very heart. Specifically it is about India, but actually it is about everybody. The poetry of the film transcends its locality and speaks to us all.

| Apr 20, 2022

Pather Panchali shows the creative imagination in its humblest involvement with the pathos of the commonplace.

| Mar 29, 2022

Pather Panchali, more than its social significance within Indian culture, film history, or even Ray's oeuvre, endures because, quite simply, Ray captures the beauty of the human condition.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 14, 2022

A film that speaks so directly and so movingly of human pain and human joy and, most important, of human dignity.

| Feb 7, 2022

It invites its audience not so much to watch from outside, as to participate.

| Dec 2, 2021

Satyajit Ray put India on the world map with this felt portrait of life in a Bengal village...

| Aug 16, 2021

Satyajit Ray speaks to the cruelty and kindness of humanity with perceptive depth in the tender first chapter of his Apu Trilogy.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Jul 16, 2021

Pather Panchali will leave many images in the mind's ye and many impressions of another way of life.

| May 5, 2021

The cast has been well selected and all the players seem completely unaware of the camera. The results are a film which is unvarnished and often painfully vivid.

| May 5, 2021

[Santayjit Ray] is an artist of stature and depth. He has taken the day by day problems of a warm and wonderful family and created a film of far reaching beauty. His mind and camera are always in rapport.

| May 5, 2021

Although Pather Panchali falls short of perfection in production, the acting is impeccable and it hits you right in the heart.

| Original Score: 4/4 | May 5, 2021

These are the people of Pather Panchali, and the director, Satyajit Ray, has less told their story than beckoned to us quietly to come and listen while they tell it.

| May 5, 2021

In its own novel idiom, at once Indian and universal, Pather Panchali has so much more to say than most films... Nor is its eloquence altogether visual. It also has a musical score by Ravi Shankar, to deepen both its moods. and its meaning.

| May 5, 2021

Ray has caught the sights and sounds of nature all about them -- beauty side by side with ugliness -- with a poet's sensitivity.

| May 5, 2021