A judicious pruning job on E.M. Forster's novel of colonial India, trimming and shaping his slow-turning pages into scenes that will "play." And besides scenes that play, there are also the players to play them: not so much Alec Guinness in brownface, but Victor Banerjee (with darkened skin himself), James Fox, Peggy Ashcroft, and Judy Davis -- especially her. This David Lean movie would seem to have closer kinship with the last David Lean movie, Ryan's Daughter (1970), in its combination of epic scope and intimist scale, than it has to those full-(or over)blown epics, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago. Here as there, the epic factor, without the accompanying spectacle and sweep and so forth, means that there will be plenty of allowance for old-fashioned novelistic virtues: the unhurried construction of the narrative, the tangential embellishment of it, the omniscient circulation among the dramatis personae to obtain various perspectives on it. The individual point-of-view shots are perhaps the most enlivening and enriching things in the entire movie: a glance out the train window at the inky glistening river; a turn of the head at the scrabble of leaves on the mosque courtyard, and the appearance of a ghostly floating figure on the far side of it -- that kind of thing. Fourteen years is a long time to go without making a movie, but there is no indication here of a fall-off in Lean's powers, such as they ever were. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd