7 Results
My Beautiful Laundrette: Postcolonialism in the Wash
Stephen Frears brings a playful and shimmering cinematic quality to Hanif Kureishi’s multilayered script about a Pakistani immigrant community in Margaret Thatcher–era London.
Kes: Winged Hope
An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King; a Peregrine for a Prince, a Saker for a Knight, a Merlin for a Lady; a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest, a Musket for a Holy water Clerk, a Kestrel for a Knave. …
The Last Picture Show: In With the Old
Early in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, as the wind from the Texas plains whips the small town of Anarene, the high school senior Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) halts his recalcitrant pickup truck—Hank Williams is warbling “Why…
The Hit: Road to Nowhere
Before the 1980s British film renaissance was curtailed by three ruinously expensive failures—Absolute Beginners, Revolution, and The Mission—it yielded a cluster of superb smaller movies, including Letter to Brezhnev, Caravaggio, and Mona Lisa. …
Charles Laughton: Size Matters
“Let me have men about me that are fat.” —Julius Caesar, act 1, scene 2 Just as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe admired small, brave men who stick to their principles, I like—in the movies at least—heavyset, flamboyant types who walk a…
The Man Who Fell to Earth:
Loving the Alien
Science-fiction drama, western, love story, metaphysical mystery, satire of modern America—The Man Who Fell to Earth is the most beguiling of the films that, in a dozen years embracing the 1970s, established Nicolas Roeg as a mainstream heir to suc…
Walker: Apocalypse When?
At the climax of Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a helicopter descends from the night sky onto a plaza where the colonial buildings are ablaze and an army of mercenaries is disintegrating. The chopper disgorges trigger-happy American combat troops and a …