Gandhi swept the 55th Academy Awards, winning eight Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director for Richard Attenborough and Best Actor for Ben Kingsley, and its critical reception on release was close to unanimous: Roger Ebert gave it four stars, and it holds an 89 percent positive score on later aggregation. That reception has not gone unchallenged since, and the challenge is worth taking seriously precisely because the film's reputation for careful, respectful biography is part of what makes it persuasive.
Historian Lawrence James called the film "pure hagiography," a judgment aimed less at any single invented scene than at the film's overall shape, which compresses and amalgamates real, separate events into fewer, more dramatically legible ones. The most specific documented objection belongs to historian Patrick French, who examined the film's famous early scene in which a young Gandhi is thrown off a South African train for refusing to leave a first-class compartment reserved for white passengers. French found that the scene, presented as the spark of Gandhi's political awakening, simplifies and in places misstates his own considerably more equivocal early views on the racial segregation South African law applied not only to white and Black South Africans but to Indians as a separate category again.
None of this makes the film's central account of Gandhi's nonviolent philosophy and its cost to him false. It does mean the film functions best, by the assessment of its own harshest scholarly readers, as an accessible introduction to be built on rather than a settled historical record to be taken as complete in itself.