Balu Mahendra to the script". As a film-maker, he claimed himself as belonging to the realistic way of story-telling devised by Satyajit Ray and Vittorio De Sica. Mahendra was drawn towards realistic cinema after watching Ray's "Pather Panchali" (1955). He is credited as being one among the earliest filmmakers to bring "naturalism" in Tamil cinema in the 1970s. He usually photographed, scripted and edited all his films. His films were characterised by strong "visual appeal" and minimal number of characters. A majority of his films centre on the complexity of human relationships and are known to portray women as strong characters. Although
Pather Panchali attention. For "Pather Panchali", remarkable as it may be, is something of a chore to sit through." Early in the 1980s, Ray was criticised by Nargis Dutt, parliamentarian and former actress, for "exporting poverty". Darius Cooper writes that while many critics celebrated the Apu trilogy "as a eulogy of third-world culture, others criticized it for what they took to be its romanticization of such a culture". As of October 2017, the film has a 98% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on an aggregate of 42 reviews with an average score of 9/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "A film