Average Rating: 5.8/10
Reviews Counted: 64
Fresh: 33 | Rotten: 31
Though pretty to look at, The Mystic Masseur is too slow-paced and lacks narrative tension.
Average Rating: 6.1/10
Critic Reviews: 23
Fresh: 14 | Rotten: 9
Though pretty to look at, The Mystic Masseur is too slow-paced and lacks narrative tension.
liked it
Average Rating: 2.9/5
User Ratings: 95
Ismail Merchant, best known as the producing half of the successful Merchant-Ivory team, once again steps behind the camera as director for this story of life among Indian expatriates in the 1950s. Ganesh (Aasif Mandvi) is a young man who was born to a community of Indian exiles living in Trinidad. Always bright, Ganesh hopes to make a career for himself as a writer, but he lacks the money to pursue writing full-time, and his ideas about education clash with those of his employers after he gets
Oct 5, 2001 Wide
Feb 25, 2003
$0.3M
ThinkFilm
All Critics (73) | Top Critics (27) | Fresh (33) | Rotten (31) | DVD (5)
A real clunker. A well-made, thoughtful, well-acted clunker, but a clunker nonetheless.
A warm-hearted gem of a film.
Top CriticA bittersweet film, simple in form but rich with human events.
Though Ganesh is successful in a midlevel sort of way, there's nothing so striking or fascinating or metaphorically significant about his career as to rate two hours of our attention.
A worthwhile way to spend two hours.
A mildly enjoyable if toothless adaptation of a much better book.
An affectionate, sun-bathed memoir.
What could have become just another cautionary fable is allowed to play out as a clever, charming tale %u2013 as pleasantly in its own way as its self-dramatizing characters.
A lyrical metaphor for cultural and personal self-discovery and a picaresque view of a little-remembered world.
Much of the humor is at the expense of these transplanted Indians, and would be considered exploitative had it not been made by people whom it's mocking.
The faithful will enjoy this sometimes wry adaptation of V.S. Naipaul's novel, but newcomers may find themselves stifling a yawn or two during the first hour.
Occasionally funny, sometimes inspiring, often boring.
A fairly dull adaptation of some highly regarded material.
Very beautiful film, the Trinidad location is a huge plus, nicely filmed, but curiously uninvolving. It has all the right stuff for a great film but somehow does not achieve greatness.
July 7, 2006
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