Review of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) by Mike M — 31 May 2007

One of the first Bollywood films to crossover into the UK box office Top 10, and the movie that would confirm Shah Rukh Khan as the leading star of his generation... Though set in the mid 90s and carried chiefly by its young leads, this nonetheless feels like a period movie or the type of film Bollywood audiences had been watching for years, with sweeping landscapes, a timeless love story, melodramatic crash-zooms at moments of high tension, classical choreography, and songs that might have been composed during the 1960s or 70s.

To a Western eye, it takes an age to facilitate the narratively inevitable, but Kajol, a doll, makes a fair case for the sexiness of the unplucked brow, while Shah Rukh's natural gift for on-screen mischief-making proves, even at this early stage in his career, infectious indeed.