Critic Reviews
79
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
17(94%)
mixed
1(6%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 18 Critic Reviews
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Metascore
Metascore
100
Using Syed and shooting on actual locations in Bombay, director Mira Nair has been able to make a film that has the everyday, unforced reality of documentary, and yet the emotional power of great drama. “Salaam Bombay!” is one of the best films of the year.
90
The real star of this film is the crowded, neon-lit byways of the city itself.
88
Nair, to her credit, doesn't succumb to any special pleading, which deepens her film's impact. Time and again, you sense that she and her subjects come from a place that believes in film, as "Salaam, Bombay" specifies its world and compels us to inhabit it. [15 Sep 1988, p.68]
88
Impressive and engrossing as it is, the reality alone is not what makes Salaam Bombay so compelling. Nair tells an interesting episodic story, and her leading lad is a natural actor. [05 Nov 1988, p.C06]
80
The film is unsparingly gritty, but with a woman's tenderness it also grants the characters an occasional moment of grace.
80
What strikes you is not simply its energy and vitality and its Dickensian storytelling appetite, but its fierce unsentimentality.
80
Watching the strength of [Nair]'s vision and her craft, balanced by the empathy shown in all her work so far--her earlier documentaries as well--there is every reason to believe that “Salaam Bombay!” marks the opening of an extraordinary career.
80
Bombay is a place of noise, restless movement and no privacy whatsover. It is squalor accepted as the natural order of things, and thus accommodated. Miss Nair does not share this fatalism, but in ''Salaam Bombay!'' she allows us to examine it without panic, and without patronizing it. She is a new film maker to watch.
80
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, the material generated largely from workshops that Nair and her team ran for a period of months prior to filming. A revelation for audiences of any background.
80
Salaam Bombay brilliantly reminds us, with barely a trace of sugarcoating, that there must always be room for the children. [23 Dec 1988, p.8]
