Irrfan Khan’s new international film, No Bed of Roses, is getting great reviews. Read excerpts

Irrfan Khan’s new film, No Bed of Roses – Doob, directed by Mostofa Sarwar Farooki, is a story of a family breaking apart. The Indo-Bangladeshi movie is getting positive reviews from American critics. Here are a few excerpts.

It takes an actor of Irrfan Khan’s stature and magnetism to turn an intimate separation drama into something special, and a writer-director like Bangladesh’s happy maverick Mostofa Sarwar Farooki to layer on subtleties and shades of meaning with realistic detachment that never slips into melodrama.

- The Hollywood Reporter

Boasting an excellent central performance from the acclaimed Indian actor Irrfan Khan, and with its nuanced cultural approach to a familiar subject, Doob should enjoy further festival attention following its June premiere in Shanghai and subsequent play in Moscow. In his first collaboration with award-winning Bangladeshi writer/director Farooki, Khan is characteristically magnetic and surprisingly empathetic as Javed Hasan.

- Screen Daily

Directed with an assured and graceful touch that evokes the elegiac tone of a requiem, Mostofa Sarwar Farooki proves he’s a singular voice in Bangladeshi cinema. With Irrfan Khan delivering another sublime lead performance (while being billed as co-producer), the film should bloom at festivals and secure a limited release in India, despite some censorship issues back home. Khan pours his own force of personality into a character who’s tormented by fierce intellect and human weakness, unable to change course even when he sees how much suffering he has caused. He portrays Javed not as a dirty old man but a desperately lonely one, clutching at any kind of diversion from his inner emptiness, echoing the Bengali title which means “drowning.”

- Variety

The film, which is produced by Irrfan, premiered in competition at the Shanghai International Film Festival in June.