"Dil Se.." is one of director Mani Ratnam's masterpieces and ranks on the world stage as a film classic. It is arguably the most talked about, influential, and referenced Bollywood films in the West. "Dil Se.." with its obsessive violent love story, that is a thinly veiled metaphor for the India / Pakistan, Kashmir conflict, is a journey of incredible filmic creativity and sensuous textural imagination. The film travels through a landscape of obsession, blind will, and desire, that ends with a doomed relationship's impossibility of reconciliation and careens to an inevitable apocalyptic conclusion. Terribly beautiful, seeped in symbolism and metaphor, fantastic, surreal, with a luminous performance by Manisha Koirala and starring the baddshah himself, Shahrukh Khan, "Dil Se.." exemplifies the power of Bollywood style film making's unique 'language' and semiotics.

It was after seeing "Dil Se.." that film director Baz Luhrmann was inspired to make the film musical "Moulin Rouge". "Dil Se.." also inspired theater producer Andrew Lloyd Webber to produce the musical, "Bollywood Dreams". Webber hired "Dil Se.."'s musical director AR Rehman to produce the music for "Bollywood Dreams".