Packed with female book club members, a screening of Mira Nair's THE NAMESAKE left no doubt about the film's target audience - yet it seems a pity to confine the movie behind the bars of a chick flick. Dividing its time between the fortunes of a Bengali immigrant to New York and those of her anxiously Americanized son, THE NAMESAKE combines the intimate pleasures of a family saga with a finely sustained inquiry into the difficult balance between separation and integration that shapes the lives of first-generation immigrants and their children in crucially different ways. This is home turf for Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, two South Asian expatriates who previously collaborated on the exuberant charmer MISSISSIPPI MASALA, an unexpected hit whose sneaky gift for laying the burden of weirdness on the host culture helped put Nair on the map. THE NAMESAKE carries faint echoes of the carnal physicality that makes Nair's more lightweight movies so much fun to look at - MONSOON WEDDING was a dandy piece of froth, and VANITY FAIR survives only on its looks - but it's a quieter, more mature work.

• http://www.villagevoice.com

It's no wonder the filmmaker was attracted to Jhumpa Lahiri's best-selling novel, with its multigenerational theme and disparate relatives. Nair has maintained the book's universality - it could be about the clash between any immigrant parents and their born-in-the-U.S.A. offspring - while vividly portraying Indian customs she knows so well, especially the ceremonies. There are two weddings (and a funeral) in THE NAMESAKE - nothing as lavish as in MONSOON WEDDING, but with enough colorful trimmings to make a traditional American nuptial look awfully white bread. (Irfan) Khan and (Kal) Penn (...) show how this father and son can be wary of each other while making the love between them palpable. The actors don't look alike, but they have taken care to match their mannerisms. (...) THE NAMESAKE could be faulted for bordering on melodrama. Screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala might have had a few less traumatic events pile up. But it was her intention, along with Nair's, to deviate as little as possible from the book. And one could argue that life, too, often comes perilously close to melodrama.

• http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle

Color is the stuff of life in the movies of Mira Nair, the Indian-born director whose newest film, THE NAMESAKE, follows two generations of a Bengali family from late-1970s Calcutta to New York City. Her lush palette lends her films a throbbing physicality that invites you to step into the screen and embrace the sensuous here and now. THE NAMESAKE, adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri’s popular novel, conveys a palpable sense of people as living, breathing creatures who are far more complex than their words might indicate. The story of upwardly mobile immigrants torn between tradition and modernity as they are absorbed into the American melting pot has been told in countless movies. This variation is gentle and compassionate. The longing for roots of these displaced middle-class Indians lends a soulful undertow to a film conspicuously lacking in melodrama.

• http://www.nytimes.com

The fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri conveys a sense of disorientation and loss, of melancholy guilt mingling with the embrace of freedom. She writes of the immigrant experience in America and the film adaptation of her first novel, THE NAMESAKE, from director Mira Nair honors her themes with a meticulous, understated, empathetic telling of the story of two generations of a Bengali family in America. What no film could probably do is get across Lahiri's rich descriptions of the quotidian that so vividly dramatizes the contrast in cultural ways of thinking and the identity confusions at the heart of her story. Nair's film settles for something closer to the surface that makes its dramatic points well and brings Lahiri's characters to life but misses the emotional intensity.

• http://www.hollywoodreporter.com

In the capable hands of director Mira Nair (bouncing back from the critically and commercially disappointing VANITY FAIR), Jhumpa Lahiri's wildly popular novel about two generations of a Bengali family receives a loving, deeply felt screen translation that should appease fans of the book while making many new converts. Bolstered by Nair's lush visual style and superb performances from ace Bollywood thesps Irrfan Khan, Tabu and HAROLD & KUMAR star Kal Penn (in his first dramatic lead) (...). Though the condensing of Lahiri's episodic, decades-spanning narrative into two compact hours of screen-time makes for a pic occasionally overstuffed with incident, THE NAMESAKE remains a richly compelling story of family and self-discovery. (...) Shot on location in New York and India, pic boasts excellent tech contributions on all fronts, particularly the warm, rich colors of Frederick Elmes' cinematography and Stephanie Carroll's production design, and the varied Western and Eastern influences of composer/DJ Nitin Sawhney's original score.

• http://www.variety.com