Mira Nair turns Jhumpa Lahiri's gentle, evocative novel The Namesake, into a gentle, evocative film.

There are bound to be quibbles about whether they get their Bengali right or whether Nair captures the culture and ethos. But it still can't take much away from this humane, warm and elegantly crafted film.

The Namesake captures the interior struggle between centuries of history and the appeal of living only in the now, and it's grippingly beautiful and overwhelmingly moving.

[The Namesake] understands that identity is not something one chooses definitively, but something fluid—reshaped by time, by experience, by the stories we inherit and the ones we create.