Regarded as one of the finest Indian filmmakers, along with his contemporaries Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Tapan Sinha, Sen played a major role in the New Wave cinema of India.

[3] He was one of the few Indian filmmakers to have won awards at the big three film festivals viz., Cannes, Venice and the Berlinale.

[6] The films that he made next were essentially political, and earned him the reputation as a Marxist artist.

He has beautifully woven the people, value system, class difference and the roads of the city into his movies and coming of age for Kolkata, his El-Dorado.

[11] On 24 July 2012, Sen was not invited to the function organised by Government of West Bengal to felicitate film personalities from the State.