Vincent Canby of
The New York Times called the film "moving" and "elegiac". He remarks that the film "has the impact of an epic without seeming to mean to" and noted various connections with Ray's own
Apu Trilogy (in its casting of Chatterjee and in it being an adaptation of another
Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay novel). "It is, however, very different from those early films" he writes, "It is the work of a director who has learned the value of narrative economy to such an extent that 'Distant Thunder,' which is set against the backdrop of the 'manmade' famine that wiped out 5 million people in 1943, has the simplicity of a
fable." Dennis Schwartz gave the film an A− and called it "[a] gentle humanist film that informs the world that over five million died of starvation and epidemics in Bengal."
Jay Cocks writing for
Time echoes Canby's assessment of it as a "
fable", writing: "Distant Thunder has the deliberate, unadorned reality of a folk tale, a fable of encroaching, enlarging catastrophe." He calls the film "superb and achingly simple ... Numbers as huge as ["5 million"] can be dangerous. A tragedy of such magnitude becomes an event abstracted by arithmetic. But Ray's artistry alters the scale. His concentrating on just a few victims of the famine causes such massive loss to become real, immediate. Ray makes numbers count."
Legacy In 2012, filmmaker
Amit Dutta included the film in his personal top ten (for "
The Sight & Sound Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time" poll). ==Awards==