Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14506 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-01-22
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Georgian, Chinese, Thai
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 225 minutes

Amazon.com
Would you believe the most enchanting musical of the year is an almost four-hour-long epic about a ragtag group of 19th-century Indian farmers who form a cricket team to take on an arrogant British captain? The old-fashioned Hollywood musical is alive and well in India's Bollywood industry, where the joyful explosion of music and dance and innocent romance abounds in sweeping epics. In this infectious tale of bloodless revolution, the underdog outcasts and oddballs of a fractured village pull together into a unified team to take on the oppressive colonial Brits at their own game. Think The Longest Yard meets The Seven Samurai by way of Rudyard Kipling, with cricket bats, choreographed dance numbers, romantic triangles, and a rousing call to solidarity. There are no surprises, but what spirit, what color, what good fun! --Sean Axmaker

From The New Yorker
This Indian film-a period musical drama about a group of drought-stricken villagers who play a cricket match against the British authorities to avoid taxation (lagaan)-is pure Bollywood. The director Ashutosh Gowariker crosses a lavish romantic epic with a muscular adventure tale and comes up with an outrageously buoyant hybrid. The musical sequences burst from the story organically, and the outdoor production numbers are composed of brilliantly edited tracking shots and spectacular choreography. Not all the performances soar (the British actors seem particularly stiff), but the romantic leads are wonderful. Aamir Khan's masterly preening is worthy of a young Tony Curtis and his ladylove, played by Gracy Singh, does a Janet Leigh turn at getting her man. The daunting four-hour length leaves plenty of room for meandering subplots and misunderstandings, but the film is so visually alive and superbly structured-it also breaks for an intermission-that you will be happily taken in by its bighearted charms. In Hindi and English. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Not as Advertised
This may be a wonderful movie. However, it's advertised as an English language film. It's not. It's in Hindi.

This DVD is in PAL format
Even though it explicitly states near the top of this page that this DVD is in NTSC format, it is not. It is in PAL format, which does not play at all on most DVD players/televisions in the United States.

As a sports movie, "Lagaan" is dramatized with great élan and suspense...
The setting is historical... The year is 1893... The British Raj imposes heavy taxes on the poor villagers despite all the problems droughts have caused on their income...

An arrogant army captain--unknown to him that his sister has fallen in love with a sensitive idealistic--confident in his countrymen's ability, offers the people relief if they can beat the fearsome British team at a game of cricket...

Despite its closeness to the conventions, "Lagaan" proved to be a break-out film... Besides the graceful and enchanting attractions of the song-and-dance sequences, it has a plot carefully fashioned to a special kind of audience--audience who likes sports movies...

They are minor characters compared to the captain's pretty sister (Rachel Shelley), who not only upholds the British tradition of fair play but also loses her heart to the handsome Indian hero...