["Nayak the Hero"] is the achievement of a great film director working outside his usual style, fumbling sometimes with surrealism, using flashbacks that flaw the usual concord of his sense of storytelling, but sometimes illumining it by lines that suddenly show character in movement, like the glare of a torch catching a figure on a staircase. (p. 67)

Penelope Gilliatt, "The Fastest Anachronism in the West," in The New Yorker (© 1974 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. L, No. 23, July 29, 1974, pp. 66-7.