Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

Using Syed and shooting on actual locations in Bombay, director Mira Nair has been able to make a film that has the everyday, unforced reality of documentary, and yet the emotional power of great drama. “Salaam Bombay!” is one of the best films of the year.

Village Voice by Leslie Camhi

The real star of this film is the crowded, neon-lit byways of the city itself.

Boston Globe by Jay Carr

Nair, to her credit, doesn't succumb to any special pleading, which deepens her film's impact. Time and again, you sense that she and her subjects come from a place that believes in film, as "Salaam, Bombay" specifies its world and compels us to inhabit it. [15 Sep 1988, p.68]

Portland Oregonian by Ted Mahar

Impressive and engrossing as it is, the reality alone is not what makes Salaam Bombay so compelling. Nair tells an interesting episodic story, and her leading lad is a natural actor. [05 Nov 1988, p.C06]

Time Out

Shot entirely on location with its child actors recruited from the streets, Salaam Bombay! enters into its subjects' lives with rare authority and absolute compassion, the material generated largely from workshops that Nair and her team ran for a period of months prior to filming. A revelation for audiences of any background.

The New York Times by Vincent Canby

Bombay is a place of noise, restless movement and no privacy whatsover. It is squalor accepted as the natural order of things, and thus accommodated. Miss Nair does not share this fatalism, but in ''Salaam Bombay!'' she allows us to examine it without panic, and without patronizing it. She is a new film maker to watch.

Los Angeles Times by Sheila Benson

Watching the strength of [Nair]'s vision and her craft, balanced by the empathy shown in all her work so far--her earlier documentaries as well--there is every reason to believe that “Salaam Bombay!” marks the opening of an extraordinary career.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

What strikes you is not simply its energy and vitality and its Dickensian storytelling appetite, but its fierce unsentimentality.

Chicago Reader by Ted Shen

The film is unsparingly gritty, but with a woman's tenderness it also grants the characters an occasional moment of grace.

Time Out by Staff (Not Credited)

Shot entirely on location with its child actors recruited from the streets, Salaam Bombay! enters into its subjects' lives with rare authority and absolute compassion, the material generated largely from workshops that Nair and her team ran for a period of months prior to filming. A revelation for audiences of any background.

Tampa Bay Times by Peter Smith

Salaam Bombay brilliantly reminds us, with barely a trace of sugarcoating, that there must always be room for the children. [23 Dec 1988, p.8]

Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt

The story sometimes seems hesitant to confront the most harrowing implications of the harsh realities it portrays. But it benefits greatly from Syed's close-to-the-bone performance as the boy.

Time by Richard Corliss

Salaam Bombay! deserves a broad audience, not just to open American eyes to plights of hunger and homelessness abroad, but to open American minds to the vitality of a cinema without rim shots and happy endings.

Variety

Director Mira Nair indulges in some melodramatic explorations, however, dangerously verging on a romanticized Oriental tearjerker mood.