A Passage to India (1984)

Regardless of what one thinks of David Lean and his old fashioned style, the results here - save perhaps for the casting of Alec Guinness as a Hindu professor - are exquisite.

Lean's visually appealing film frequently connects as a social satire and a mystical melodrama of transgressors looking for footholds in psychically threatening territory.

Lean isn't on his A-game here, but the film isn't bad.

Though not flawless, Lean's swan song is an intelligent adaptation of Forster's complex novel about racil prejudice and sexual repression, flaunting wonderful perfromances from the two leads, Judy Davis and particularly Dame Peggy Ashcroft.

Epic, briliantly photographed, but slow David Lean drama.

Lean does an excellent job of conveying the repressive nature of British society captured in the novel.

The film, for all Lean’s innate elegance, is strangely remote and unmoving. It could easily have been a Merchant-Ivory film.

While the storytelling is rather toothless, A Passage to India is certainly well worth watching for fans of the director's epic style.