The Reluctant Fundamentalist Movie Reviews

Mira Nair takes on the daunting task of adapting Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ and skillfully transforms a monologue into an engaging plot. She weaves an elaborate tale, infusing it with warmth and texture.

Can you be who you really are when the world around you forces you to believe otherwise? 9/11 changed the West's perception of Islam forever. While various films have had the unsettling issue as a backdrop, Mira Nair's riveting adaptation goes way deeper. Its sensitive yet unsubtle narrative succeeds at retaining the book's ambiguity, as well as raising pertinent questions on Islamic fundamentalism, emigration and USA's interference in Pakistan

Do you know what a janissary is? Before you head out to see the new Mira Nair [ Images ] film do look that one up! Janissary: a member of an elite military unit of the Turkish army organized in the 14th century © Random House Dictionary. Young boys were cruelly whisked away at the age of seven, or less, from Christian families in the Ottoman Empire, forcibly converted to Islam and trained to serve and be loyal footmen of the empire. Kara Khalil Chendereli

A young Pakistani armed with a Princeton degree arrives in America with corporate dreams. His starry-eyed vision is on track as is his love life with his white girlfriend, an artist. Then the planes crash into World Trade Center on 9/11. That was 10 years before the point where we find him at the filmâ??s start, in a Lahore chai shop narrating his life to an American journalist. He has swapped his dapper looks for a bearded image, and he could be leading

Its sensitive yet unsubtle narrative succeeds at retaining the book’s ambiguity, as well as raising pertinent questions on Islamic fundamentalism, emigration and USA’s interference in Pakistan. Nair captures the finer nuances of the thought-provoking tale with great conviction.

Spare time for this one, if you truly want to give sanity a chance, in the fast turning topsy-turvy world of us vs them.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is everything and perhaps more than what you would expect from a Mira Nair film. The plot is superb, the direction is good, and the acting is good enough.

A Pakistani immigrant working as a financial analyst for an A-list Wall Street company is tasked with closing down a failing Istanbul publishing firm. At one of their meetings, the publisher talks of his country’s ancient Christian-Muslim conflict. The analyst is also presented with a book of his poet-father in a Turkish translation. Soon afterwards, he goes to a basilica-turned-mosque to pray, has an epiphany and decides not to chase the American Dream

His name is Khan and he is not a terrorist. 9/11 and its follow up has often been fodder for film makers who have used the tragedy as a backdrop or taken real life incidents to tell stories. Mira Nair does both in her on screen adaptation of Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s book of the same name. The story begins as a narrative where Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed) is sitting in a student café taking American journalist Bobby (Liev Schreiber)

Is being a person of colour a cardinal sin in the West, still? There is a moment in the film when the protagonist looks at a TV screen showing one of the most devastating moments of this century, and his instant reaction is horror mixed with, yes, stunned admiration. The response is involuntary. What audacity, he thinks, and the voice over lets us into his thoughts. The image is that of the twin towers under attack in Manhattan, those planes crashing

The film could have done with more finesse in the way it begins and ends, but there are enough subtle shifts in the main act to keep me with it. After Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is Nair’s most engaging work. – See more at: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/review-the-reluctant-fundamentalist-is-mira-nairs-most-engaging-work/1117080/0#sthash.mwL52ECG.dpuf

Review: Just as the 9/11 terrorist attacks left the world on either side of a widening chasm, Changez is a man torn between his Great American Dream......

The film, based on the acclaimed novel of the same name authored by Mohsin Hamid, is a typical Mira Nair film in terms of the cascade of colours, textures, frames and characters. Unlike the novel, the film is a blunt, slow and pretentious work of art. It's about the meteoric rise and fall of a Pakistani migrant in the US. The film begins with an intimidating situation, where an American professor at Lahore University is kidnapped

In spite of its relevance in today’s time, the film’s pace and lack of emotional connect makes Mira Nair’s latest film a tad disappointing.

Director Mira Nair takes every word of every page of the 2007 book of the same name and makes it as superficial and melodramatic as humanly possible. While the book was known for its open ending that left the true nature of its protagonist ambiguous, the film version pretty much milks the tempest in the teapot. Riz Ahmed stars as Changez, a Pakistani man who leaves his family behind to become a top dog at Wall Street but is disillusioned

Apart from the all-too-contrived screenplay – really, how much dramatic licence can you grant irrelevant flashbacks? – Nair’s tiresomely tangled film articulates too little and too late.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist Review: Rating: 3/5 stars (Three Stars) | What’s Good: The film preserves the mood ...