Trishna engages the potent collisions of the rural and the urban, the poor and the rich, and considers how these interactions unfold in a romance and how they might also destroy it. full review

While the film never delves deep enough into its characters' emotions to be truly spellbinding, it's well worth seeing. full review

Winterbottom has complete control of the film's look and feel, but the story seems to run away from him. full review

A rare unsatisfying swerve from an otherwise reliably provocative career. full review

"Trishna" works largely on the strength of Winterbottom's clever updates of a century-old story. full review

A loose but nonetheless pretty faithful recasting of Hardy's penultimate tragedy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. full review

Winterbottom gives a bright panorama of Indian life, from the agrarian countryside to the tumult of Jaipur and the sophistication of Mumbai. full review

"Trishna" should move the soul and engage the tear-ducts, yet it passes by as distant as it is lovely. And the blame must fall on the movie's star, Freida Pinto. full review

This escalation of passions and Trishna's humiliation demands much of both actors, yet neither Pinto nor Ahmed is completely convincing and this is the main flaw of Trishna. full review

The new setting revivifies the harsh forces of class and gender at work in the story. full review

Winterbottom is a director who never repeats himself, films all over the world, and in "Trishna," effortlessly embeds his story in modern India. full review

Winterbottom uses the Indian locations with a documentarian's eye and a dramatist's mind. full review

Pinto, stoic and stunning, demonstrates why this heroine and this tale of her woe still have power more than 150 years after it was written. full review

Spectacular visually, though awfully somber dramatically. full review

Pinto's lack of dramatic range (she basically has two expressions) and an awkward third act do not provide a solid foundation for Hardy's tragic ending. full review

As a portrait of a nation amid accelerated and profound change, "Trishna" is a vivid piece of cinema. As a melodrama, it's provocative without being emotionally involving, the central performance more distancing than engaging. full review

This is one of the best and bravest of recent adaptations of classic literature; if you're even a little bit intrigued, ignore what others say and don't let it pass you by. full review

Life is suffering, as the Buddha said (including in Hardy's emotionally grinding novels), but it's more complex and contradictory than the ginned-up realism Mr. Winterbottom delivers here. full review

Something in Hardy's tragic inclinations obviously appeals to Winterbottom; this is the third time he's adapted one of the author's novels, with the liberties he takes with the source material increasing each time. full review

The shots of urban traffic jams have more spark than the story, which skips from a pregnancy to the filming of a musical to murder - without convincing us of any of it. full review