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Midnight's Children Play Trailer Get Showtimes

Midnight's Children (2013)

tomatometer

44

Average Rating: 5.6/10
Reviews Counted: 43
Fresh: 19 | Rotten: 24

Though Midnight's Children is beautiful to look at and poignant in spots, its script is too indulgent and Deepa Mehta's direction, though ambitious, fails to bring the story together cohesively.

29

Average Rating: 5.5/10
Critic Reviews: 14
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 10

Though Midnight's Children is beautiful to look at and poignant in spots, its script is too indulgent and Deepa Mehta's direction, though ambitious, fails to bring the story together cohesively.

audience

43

liked it
Average Rating: 3/5
User Ratings: 1,000

My Rating

Movie Info

At the stroke of midnight on August 15th, 1947, as India declares independence from Great Britain, two babies are switched at birth by a nurse in a Bombay hospital. And so it is that Saleem Sinai, the bastard child of a beggar woman, and Shiva, the only son of a wealthy couple, are fated to live the destinies meant for each other. Over the next three decades, Saleem and Shiva find themselves on opposite sides of many a conflict, whether it be because of class, politics, romantic rivalry, or the

Unrated,

Drama, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Deepa Mehta, Salman Rushdie

$36.5k

Paladin Films - Official Site External Icon

Cast

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All Critics (43) | Top Critics (14) | Fresh (19) | Rotten (24)

There are enough intermittent passages of power and beauty to get you through the slow spots.

May 3, 2013 Full Review Source: Christian Science Monitor
Christian Science Monitor
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A pretty but staidly linear epic drained of the novel's larkish, metaphorical sweep, and a collection of multi-generational love stories lacking their originally eccentric, fizzy charm.

May 3, 2013 Full Review Source: Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
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Mehta has given us something as pale as it is panoramic.

May 2, 2013 Full Review Source: Newsday
Newsday
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Rushdie's characteristic antic humor animates the family scenes, but the movie gets bogged down in endless plot convolutions and whimsy (the material would have worked better as a TV miniseries).

April 29, 2013 Full Review Source: New Yorker
New Yorker
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In its steady great-books way, the film is often truthful and moving.

April 26, 2013 Full Review Source: New York Post
New York Post
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A movie that, if never exactly dull, feels drained of the mythic juice that powers the book, which won the Booker Prize in 1981.

April 25, 2013 Full Review Source: New York Times
New York Times
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Rushdie adeptly trims his sprawling tale down to a still-substantial 2 1/2-hour movie, which only occasionally seems to hurry.

May 8, 2013 Full Review Source: Oregonian
Oregonian

Stirring, beautifully filmed and highly personal history of India does right by Salman Rushdie's celebrated novel.

April 26, 2013 Full Review Source: Film Journal International
Film Journal International

Both dreamy and dramatic, a fascinating view of Indian history seen through the prism of a personal story.

April 25, 2013 Full Review Source: Hollywood & Fine
Hollywood & Fine

An ambitious film conveying the complicated and violent early history of India and Pakistan through the stories of two boys born on independence day.

April 23, 2013 Full Review Source: Spirituality and Practice
Spirituality and Practice

Overproduced.

April 23, 2013 Full Review Source: Compuserve
Compuserve

Deepa Mehta's respectful approach to the material may meander and simplify, but it gradually gains in emotional power, building into a moving account of a man whose many experiences mirror the growing pains of an independent India.

April 22, 2013 Full Review Source: Screen International
Screen International

Preserves much of the novel's intricacy and human drama, perhaps due to Salman Rushdie's involvement as co-screenwriter, even if it remains singularly unremarkable from a cinematic perspective.

April 21, 2013 Full Review Source: Slant Magazine
Slant Magazine

With an over-written screenplay and far too much material for audiences to digest, this film proves the rule that authors shouldn't adapt their own books into movies.

January 4, 2013 Full Review Source: Contactmusic.com
Contactmusic.com

Considering Midnight's Children is bound up in notions of identity, it is faintly disastrous that this adaptation should be so lacking in one of its own.

December 31, 2012 Full Review Source: Daily Telegraph
Daily Telegraph

Audience Reviews for Midnight's Children

First and foremost, "Midnight's Children" is a suitably epic and pointed look at post independence India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as viewed through the eyes of the generation coming of age with their respective countries. The movie's main target is Partition, not only in the immediate harm it did, but also in how it continues to affect all three countries as the gift that keeps on giving. As the opening line of the movie says, we cannot understand the present without first understanding the past...

...but somewhere on the way to the screen, Salman Rushdie collaborating with director Deepa Mehta on adapting his own novel leaves behind much of the fantasy which made the book such an intriguing read about the midnight's children, the closer those born to midnight of independence day in 1947, the greater their special abilities, with an emphasis on the rivalry between Saleem Sinai(as a boy, Darsheel Safary, later, Satya Bhabha) and Shiva(Siddharth), both born exactly at midnight in the same hospital. Said fantasy would have definitely helped with the above allegory. Instead, the movie takes forever to get started(mind the generalization but I am beginning to suspect that everybody in India has a romantic tale of how their parents or grandparents met and fell in love) while keeping some details that are not exactly relevant to the larger story.
April 30, 2013
Harlequin68
Walter M.

Super Reviewer

Deepa Mehta is hearing too many voices in her head. The viewers should be given free Tylenol at end of the show if they are still sitting.
May 4, 2013
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