Bride and Prejudice: Critic Reviews

This festively busy and exuberantly multicultural charmer is its own intriguingly postmodern creation -- a savory entertainment as irresistibly faux-exotic as a Putumayo CD sampler of world music.

Gurinder Chadha's film, which transports Jane Austen's 1813 novel to 21st-century India, is as high concept and rife with cliche as anything ever churned out by Hollywood.

This feels more like a mixed-up Bollywood sitcom.

A big, sprawling, sweet-natured mishmash with plots upon subplots and enough characters to make the head spin.

Bride works because of its heedless, heart-on-its-sleeve spirit.

In attempting to show us a love blind to class, culture, and color, [Chadha has] also made it bland.

Every so often, the unseen managers of the galaxy bestow on us mere mortals a vision of rare incongruous beauty: a solar eclipse, a streaking comet, a shooting star, Bollywood goddess Aishwarya Rai happily riding a tractor.

The lyrics for the musical numbers are delightfully clever, the dancing has an energetic, let's-put-on-a-show quality, and the movie is as gorgeous to look at as its cast.

A colorful cavort in songs and saris, Bride & Prejudice has infectious high spirits, though its showmanship upstages plot and characters.

A more-than-pleasant diversion.

Bride & Prejudice is a fun family movie, with eye candy for everyone in the audience.

A free-spirited adaptation of the Jane Austen novel.

Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice is a pretty movie, but it's also a pretty crazy one.

Bride very well may be the first not-so-great film since Viva Las Vegas that I watched with an ear-to-ear grin throughout. It's pure pleasure.

It's not insightful, but it sure is a lot of fun.

For those who love this kind of stuff, it's pure popcorn pleasure.

Delights in setting itself up as a target for cultural purists but triumphs with its devil-may-care, good-humored fun.

Though nobody will mistake it for the real thing, Bride & Prejudice is the best attempt at adapting Bollywood style to Western tastes since Moulin Rouge.

If you're not giggling or tapping your feet or swaying back and forth in your seat during this one, have someone check your pulse.

Who would have guessed that transposing the Bennet family of Netherfield Park in 1790s Britain to a middle-class home in contemporary Amritsar, India would require so little forcing?

What is silly about Bride is also what makes it special. That and its leading lady, the luminous Aishwarya Rai.

Bride and Prejudice is bright, colorful, and exhilarating, and brings new dimensions to a story that has been told so many times that it's astounding to recognize that someone has found a fresh perspective.

Resistance to the picture's evident wish to please becomes futile. In the end, it's impossible not to smile.

Purists who think Austen will be spinning in her grave will be wrong. She'll be dancing.

There's a real sense of unbridled spectacle here, which extends to putting a gospel choir on the beach in Santa Monica for the film's L.A. sequences, and it's best to simply let it all wash over you.