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Brick Lane

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United Kingdom, India · 2007
Rated PG-13 · 1h 42m
Director Sarah Gavron
Starring Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik, Christopher Simpson, Naeema Begum
Genre Drama

The grind of daily life as a Brick Lane Bangladessi as seen through the eyes of Nazneen, who, at 17, leaves her country for an arranged marriage. Years later, living in East London with her family, she meets a Karim, a young man, who causes her to question her previously held values in this film based on the novel by the same name.

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What are people saying?

Kelsey Thomas Profile picture for Kelsey Thomas

A surprising, if slow-moving, drama that tells an old story in a new way. The politics of the film feel almost secondary to Nazneen’s crisis of self, which holds the film together from beginning to end. A three-dimensional heroine is always admirable, but maybe her emotional depth could be better connected to the historical events that shape her personal life.

What are critics saying?

70

Village Voice by

Absorbing enough, moving enough, and visually attractive enough to provide a perfectly acceptable night out at the movies.

70

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

Certainly 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.

50

Los Angeles Times by Jan Stuart

Brick 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.

70

Variety by Robert Koehler

Monica 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.

58

The A.V. Club by Tasha Robinson

Brick 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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