Critic Reviews

Tells a story we think we already know, but we're wrong: It has new things to say within an old formula.

Beautifully acted and written so its themes are touched upon glancingly rather than with full force.

A sensitive and occasionally poetic film, Brick Lane is an absorbing tale of personal empowerment and emotional growth.

The 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.

A slow-moving but heartfelt film.

While 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.

The movie has a vibrant, sturdy pathos in the manner of Dickens.

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.

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

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.