[Roughly] two-thirds of The World of Apu, with which Ray closes his trilogy, are well worth the trouble, and some of this is as fine, in its own way, as the best of Pather Panchali…. Ray is so thoroughly in command of his material that for the first hour or so the reality of people, of their differentiated and changing worlds, leaps unquestioned from the screen.

Looking back over this film and back over the trilogy as a whole, you see that it was chiefly this reality of persons and backgrounds that spoke to Ray from the start. Where he deals most directly with its substance, he produces great cinema; where he deals with the pre-arranged reality of a conventional screenplay, he lapses into a rather unaccustomed second gear; and where he deals with outright artifice, his technique becomes faintly spurious or, at the very least, arguable. This...