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

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

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

| 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

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

For a film about such hopelessness, Salaam Bombay! is surprisingly cheering.

| May 20, 2003

The director's experience making documentaries served her well as she worked for weeks with the kids who inhabit Bombay's backstreets.

| Feb 5, 2002

A savvy, unsentimentalized first feature by director Mira Nair.

| Jan 1, 2000

Nair has been able to make a film that has the everyday, unforced reality of documentary, and yet the emotional power of great drama.

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