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88Tells a story we think we already know, but we're wrong: It has new things to say within an old formula.
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80Beautifully acted and written so its themes are touched upon glancingly rather than with full force.
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75A slow-moving but heartfelt film.
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75While the film pivots around Nazneen, perhaps at the expense of other characters, it doesn't sell her short. This is a rich, revealing and elegant portrait, and one well worth spending time with.
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75A sensitive and occasionally poetic film, Brick Lane is an absorbing tale of personal empowerment and emotional growth.
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75The characters in Brick Lane must define themselves and determine where "home" is before they can move forward, and that dramatic conflict lies at the heart of this motion picture.
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75The movie has a vibrant, sturdy pathos in the manner of Dickens.
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Absorbing enough, moving enough, and visually attractive enough to provide a perfectly acceptable night out at the movies.
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70Certainly touching, even heart-rending at times, and it mostly steers clear of the didacticism and sentimentality its subject matter often invites. But it never takes the full measure of its modest heroine, and makes her world a bit too small.
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70Monica Ali's elegant and critically trumpeted debut novel, Brick Lane, about the travails, conflicting emotions and quiet liberation of a Muslim woman in London, is a far lesser thing in its bigscreen transformation.
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Taken for what it is, Brick Lane is something entirely its own.
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67Like many things about Brick Lane, this story is dealt with in too cursory and pat a fashion. The film's heart can't be faulted, but its head is working in a regrettably low gear.
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67A thoughtful and often evocative drama of identity and assimilation, but she leaves Nazneen so cocooned in her protective shell of disconnection that we can't connect emotionally.
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63Restrained and decorous to a fault.
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63Easily, the best character in the film is Nazneen's tubby husband, who's been angling to take the family back to Bangladesh.
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63The arc of Nazneen's character, from drudge to feminist heroine, is predictably saintly. Chanu is a far more intriguingly human figure, the redeemed fool.
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60Well-acted and grounded in reality, Brick Lane is never overly emotional, even when it deals with the days after 9/11.
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58One of those feminist cries in the dark in which the heroine, a saintly sufferer, is more admirable than interesting.
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58Brick Lane comes far too late to be groundbreaking, and tries to do too much to be fully coherent, but its talent for avoiding obvious choices on all fronts, narratively and stylistically, make it worth a look.
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50Wraps a sari around the kind of suffering-housewife picture that became a cliché 30 years ago.
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50Has beautiful scenery and some enjoyable moments but leaves the viewer feeling the need to find the book to get the rest of the story.
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50Brick Lane has been whittled down from Monica Ali's expansive 2003 novel into a glossy but overly efficient drama that, like Nazneen's husband, is ultimately too ineffectual to make much of a dent.
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50Even as Brick Lane manages to sidestep one formula, it falls prey to another.
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50The movie is notable for its perceptive take on issues facing immigrants, and atmospherically photographed by Robbie Ryan (Red Road), but its flat, static quality belies the novel's richness.
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50For most of the movie, we feel as trapped as she does, and the lurching narrative seems anything but novelistic.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 2
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Mixed: 0 out of 2
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Negative: 0 out of 2
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JayH.7
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HarrietC.6