Alessandra Stanley of "The New York Times" said, "By trying so hard for authenticity, this "Doctor Zhivago" drains the story of much of its lyricism... Mr. Lean's grander, glossier version was a closer match to the romantic spirit of the novel's hero... The Davies version is engrossing but more for the harrowing scenes set in the civil war after the revolution than for the novel's legendary love triangle. Black-and-white archival photographs - Moscow slums, newspaper shots of soldiers marching off to World War I - are interspersed throughout the film and slowly bleed into a scene of the television show. The visual trick gives the series a quasi-documentary feel and is quite effective. Yet Mr. Davies takes the same liberties with Pasternak's text as the original film did, focusing on the love story and discarding a lot of the politics, secondary plots and literary sidetracks... This "Doctor Zhivago" can be watched as a useful history lesson and as a cautionary show business tale: it is a lot easier to adapt a Jane Austen novel than it is to remake a film by David Lean."