Watch Bombay For Free

That was an excellent one.

Please don't spend money on this.

Just what I expected

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Ace filmmaker Mani Ratnam has attempted a film on inter-religion marriage and the aftermath of communal riots and came out with flying colors. Ratnam has struck all the right chords here as nothing in this film looks out of place and almost all characters have given their very best. Arvind Swamy shows that he has what it takes to be the numero uno in the industry after his superb performance in Roja while Manisha Koirala is indeed very good here as a Muslim girl torn between her family and her Hindu lover and then a distraught mother of lost twins. None of the actresses portray vulnerability on screen like she does. Nassar is good as the hero's father while Kitty pitches in another believable performance as the heroine's Muslim father. Music is excellent and I understand why after Bombay, Ratnam chooses A.R. Rahman as the music composer for most of his films. Cinematography is breath-taking and the scenarios of the rural India and the suburban Mumbai have been captured genuinely and beautifully. Bombay easily goes down in cinematic history as a classic and it does show some disturbing pictures of the aftermath of the Hindu-Muslim riot like charred, deformed bodies of little children after being burnt down which is truly heart wrenching and might melt even the stone-hearted.Just brilliant! Give it a shot.

First having heard the music and later having eyewitness information from the 1993 riots in Mumbai from my wife (who was in her early teens at the time), I sat and watched this movie in my home on what happened to be India's 60th Independence Day anniversary. I must admit I was stunned and baffled and all that, especially from the magnificent depiction of an impossible love story. The riot scenes in the second half of the film are also quite moving, but the end of the film lacks some of the momentum found elsewhere.Nevertheless, this is a movie worth watching, especially in the company of Indians, since it contains a lot of symbolism hardly understandable to "us" foreigners.

Begins like a silly Indian love/dance movie and develops into the strongest, most emotional movie I have ever seen. I saw it in the Gothenburg film festival and I saw couples holding each other after the film finished (comforting each other) and a guy asked: " Do they have a crisis center set up to help us deal with the movie now?". Religious tensions and human conflicts is a hard subject (doing the right vs the wrong thing), wonderfully dealt with in this movie. A strong argument for peace and a colorful tale of recent Indian history. See it.

This movie is often compared to Spielberg's "Schindler's List", as the one and only movie which actually works in this context and how Spielberg could have made it to express his strong pathetic and political emotions. What a shame that "Bombay" haven't got such a big audience.The true life epos tells us the story of the Muslim-Hindu conflict 1995 in Bombay from the viewpoint of a young Muslim-Hindu couple doomed to leave their home town and families. This movie was made in the south, in Madras, shortly after the riots, and was immediately synchronized in Bombay to Hindi for the big audience. During the next three hours (the typical hindi movie length) everything works out fine, until the last thirty minutes where the Bombay riots suddenly break up everything. Mani Ratnam is the one and only director how dares to bring a song (every Hindi movie is a musical) during the very realistic war scenes, where such a scene actually works. Scenes where you are immediately reminded to how you would have shaken your head or laughed if this was just "Schindler's List". Imagine the jews singing in the last 30 minutes. Or the Trier train dance scene (for which you have to see "Dil Se") cut to the end. Not so here. They sing about the cruelty of war. Stop fighting. Crying, laughing, singing, dying, very close together. Where Trier sinks into unbelievable and childish anti-dead sentence pathos, Ratnam is still with the people, full of positive power. Incredible. A must see from one of the most important directors world-wide.