The Brother From Another Planet
All Films
•
1h 49m
Directed by John Sayles | 109 mins | 1984
New to Earth and fleeing bondage on his own planet, a mute telepath extraterrestrial known only as “The Brother” (Joe Morton)—who has the outward appearance of a twentysomething African American male hits the streets of Harlem—gets a crash course in the baffling complexities of race and class politics in Reagan era America while trying to stay one step ahead of a pair of bounty hunters from back home played by David Strathairn and writer-director Sayles. A scrappy, endlessly inventive, and drily funny cultural assimilation allegory, with Morton’s wordless central performance invoking the great silent films of yore, and the nocturnal street photography of Ernest R. Dickerson capturing a radically altered ’80s Manhattan.
Up Next in All Films
-
The Competition
Directed by Claire Simon | 121 mins | 2016
The Competition begins, significantly, with the image of a locked gate—that of La Fémis, one of the most prestigious film schools in the world, offering hands-on training from working professionals and accepting only 40 students per year from hundreds of... -
The Decline of Western Civilization
Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 100 mins | 1981
Without doubt one of the great rock docs, Penelope Spheeris’s headily discordant portrait of West Coast punk—her directorial debut—showcases such hardcore luminaries as X, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Germs. As pure and pungent a time capsule as th... -
The Decline of Western Civilization P...
Directed by Penelope Spheeris | 93 mins | 1988
The scummy, lightening-in-a-bottle Los Angeles punk scene that Penelope Spheeris captured in the first “Decline of Western Civilization” (1981) had morphed considerably by the time of this second instalment, nearly a decade later: the hair was bigger...
