What strikes you is not simply its energy and vitality and its Dickensian storytelling appetite, but its fierce unsentimentality.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 17, 2021

A warm and lively film, made by Mira Nair with only a handful of professional actors.

| Apr 9, 2019

Salaam Bombay! is an enormously moving and powerful film about life for children in the slums of Bombay.

| Apr 30, 2018

"The original Slumdog Millionaire"... Salaam Bombay! doesn't sweeten its depiction of poverty with feelgood fantasy, but Nair does nevertheless convey the energy and vitality that here co-exists with extreme deprivation.

| Jun 25, 2017

Just as the visuals are unexpectedly delightful, so is the three- dimensional carving of the characters in what could be a cliche Third World hell.

| Sep 29, 2015

Like Hector Babenco's Pixote the film is unsparingly gritty, but with a woman's tenderness it also grants the characters an occasional moment of grace.

| Sep 29, 2015

Watching this picture feels more like a solemn duty than a form of entertainment or enrichment. And whether it is fantasy or reality, a movie should never be something you see as a duty.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 29, 2015

Salaam Bombay! deserves a broad audience, not just to open American eyes to plights of hunger and homelessness abroad, but to open American minds to the vitality of a cinema without rim shots and happy endings.

| Sep 29, 2015

Much to Nair`s credit, she exploits neither the exoticism of her locale (there are no tour-guide, look-at-this flourishes) nor the misery of her subjects (suffer they may, but they do not demand pity).

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 29, 2015

The movie is terrifically well acted and beautifully filmed, however, marking an auspicious feature-film debut for Indian-American director Mira Nair.

| Sep 29, 2015

Dispossession and despair are seldom portrayed with such force on-screen. Director Mira Nair has done a masterful job of underscoring a social problem that has repercussions far beyond the Third World.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 29, 2015

Poetic, powerful and disturbing, Salaam Bombay transcends language and cultural barriers.

| Sep 29, 2015

Very sad, but powerfully moving.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 29, 2015

Dickensian in its empathy with the poor, uncompromising in its realism and ambitious in both scope and technique, this debut feature from Mira Nair is one of the most arresting studies of street life ever made.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 29, 2015

Director Mira Nair, trained in America, is very much in control of her material, tells her story efficiently and has most of the cast, none of them real professionals, under total control.

| Mar 26, 2009

honest and haunting portrait

| Original Score: A- | May 28, 2008

Nair's debut, winner of Cannes Festival Camera d'Or, tells the harrowing story of one boy's life among thieves, prostitutes and drug dealers. Though inspired by De Sica, Babenco, and Ray, it acheves distinctive intensity and color from its unique locale

| Original Score: A- | Oct 4, 2006

Shot entirely on location with its child actors recruited from the streets, Salaam Bombay! enters into its subjects' lives with rare authority and absolute compassion.

| Feb 9, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 8, 2004

Will take your breathe away with its harrowing portrait of the deprivations endured by a hungry and homeless boy.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 28, 2004