Critic Reviews

• Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

  The pulp is served thick, with so much sincerely purple passion it's disarming.

• Nick Schager, Time Out New York

  It's a film that proves the concept "overwrought" is the same in every language.

• Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times

  The result is a lovers-on-the-lam blast of pure pulp escapism, so devoted to diversion that you probably wonâ(TM)t even notice the corn.

• Manuel Mendoza, Dallas Morning News

  Kites morphs into an action picture, complete with unfathomable chase scenes and a Thelma & Louise ending that is laugh-out-loud hilarious.

• Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

  It tells a simple story -- an almost archetypal story -- but it does so with a lot of passion and technical sophistication.

• Bruce Demara, Toronto Star

  An intense, exciting and highly entertaining film.

• Todd Gilchrist, Cinematical

  a straight-to-video tale that somehow mysteriously managed to find its way to the silver screen.

• David Chute, L.A. Weekly

  Not even the incoherent mishmash of plot...can entirely dim the appeal of this match-up between a blue-eyed Punjabi and a blue-eyed Mexican of almost equal comeliness.

• Tony Macklin, tonymacklin.net

  Kites is an aromatic, cinematic Indian mutton stew -- if that sounds different from usual movie fare, it is. It's a Bollywood mixture of romance, violence, action, music, and differing cultures and languages. Kites flutters and plummets.

• Steven Hyden, AV Club

  To anyone versed in Bollywood conventions, it's a natural outgrowth of the genre, and a comically overwrought but still generally fun time.

• Tim Cogshell, Boxoffice Magazine

  Often terrible, yet completely engrossing film from Indian director Anurag Basu.

• Susan Granger, SSG Syndicate

  A lush, lavish Bollywood-meets-Hollywood fantasy, available for viewing in both a shorter and longer version, courtesy of Brett Ratner.

• Annlee Ellingson, Moving Pictures Magazine

  By the third act, you find the characters and story growing on you and the romance, despite the histrionics, moving.

• Liz Braun, Jam! Movies

  Kites is, essentially, a love story. With exploding cars.

• Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle

  Director Basu also has a tendency to backlight scenes, giving them epic, otherworldly glows that become all the more distracting with their increasing predictability.

• Frank Swietek, One Guy's Opinion

  A weird fusion of romantic excess, overwrought violence and crudely-staged action, all played to the rafters, filmed in garish colors and accompanied by a bombastic background score.

• Peter Sobczynski, eFilmCritic.com

  There are many words that could be used to describe "Kites" in a review--indeed, even the trusty Oxford English Dictionary almost seems inadequate for such a task--but "boring" is most definitely not one of them.

Read all 17 critic reviews