Observer by Rex Reed

Unsparing in its depiction of violence and carnage, the movie meets an even greater challenge showing the myriad of ways people from every class, culture and creed found the courage and strength to unite and join forces in order to survive.

Film Threat by Andy Howell

No amount of words that can convey the sense of the film, because it is such a gut-punch of emotion.

Original-Cin by Liam Lacey

The craft of the re-enactment is more impressive than the script, which defaults to hackneyed dramatic moments, reminiscent of a generic disaster film, with its stock upstairs-downstairs tropes, young lovers, the cynic-turned-hero, and the dutiful subalterns showing courage above their pay grade.

Screen Daily by Sarah Ward

Writer/director Anthony Maras largely sticks to the dramatisation playbook, but does so in an effective, affecting and empathetic fashion.

The Guardian

Hotel Mumbai is an excellent, white-knuckle thriller – and an unlikely crowd-pleaser.

Screen International by Sarah Ward

Writer/director Anthony Maras largely sticks to the dramatisation playbook, but does so in an effective, affecting and empathetic fashion.

The Guardian by Katie Goh

Hotel Mumbai is an excellent, white-knuckle thriller – and an unlikely crowd-pleaser.

Austin Chronicle by Danielle White

The finished product is two hours of fist-clenching action, suddenly violent and steadily horrifying.

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

What redeems Hotel Mumbai from morbid opportunism is that, in all but its slickest and most Hollywood moments, the thrills of Maras’ heart-wrenching re-enactment are never an end unto themselves.

Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan

The callousness with which the terrorists operate is palpable and conveyed with a degree of verisimilitude that borders on sadism. Hotel Mumbai is a clockwork thriller, but man, is it hard to watch.

The Seattle Times by Soren Andersen

It’s a horrifying tale, and Maras, a Greek-Australian filmmaker, does not shy away from showing the carnage.

Chicago Tribune by Katie Walsh

Visceral and suspenseful, Hotel Mumbai is also deeply humane and moving, anchored by searing performances from Patel, Kher, Boniadi and Hammer.

The New Yorker by Anthony Lane

Is it any surprise that this disturbing brand of cinema was triggered by 9/11, a catastrophe that, despite the valor it called forth, and the wars that ensued, lies beyond redemption and revenge? Or that Hotel Mumbai, a well-staged model of the form, should leave you feeling fidgety and low? You can admire a film, reel at the horrors it unfolds, and still wind up asking yourself, helplessly, what it was all for.

Variety by Peter Debruge

Sitting through the harrowing events again nearly a decade later could hardly be described as entertainment, and the film plays to many of the same unseemly impulses that make disaster movies so compelling, exploiting the tragedy of the situation for spectacle’s sake.

The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer

The film is both gripping in its execution — although a two-hours-plus running time feels a bit stretched — and totally bland in what it’s trying to say, with characters who don’t really stand out onscreen.

The Playlist by Gregory Ellwood

There’s a line for an audience between conveying the true horror of what occurred and being excessive and Maras barely avoids the latter.

The Film Stage

Hotel Mumbai is a great crowd pleaser but with a dangerously myopic narrative that, even with its flaws, serves a fitting tribute to the resilience of the people who lived and died through the terror attacks of 2008, but it definitely needs an audience which doesn’t believe everything it sees.

The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo

If the thought of seeing a lot of people get murdered with automatic weapons at close range makes you queasy right now, Hotel Mumbai is not a film you want to go anywhere near. Few slasher movies have such a high, graphic body count.