The Brother From Another Planet
Leaving Soon
•
1h 49m
Leaving October 1
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 Leaving Soon
-
The Pain of Others
Leaving October 1
Directed by Penny Lane | 71 mins | 2018
Taking Leslie Jamison’s 2013 Harper’s essay on Morgellons disease as a jumping off point, Penny Lane here assembles clips of YouTube vloggers claiming to suffer from the controversial disease purposefully and with great care. She draws he... -
The Siren
Leaving October 1
Directed by Sepideh Farsi | 100 mins | 2023
Crisply animated in a vivid, minimalistic 2D style, Farsi’s "The Siren" shows us the opening salvos of the devastating 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, and their terrible human toll, in telling the tale of 14-year-old Omid. As hostile forces th... -
The Woman Who Ran
Leaving October 1
Directed by Hong Sangsoo | 77 mins | 2020
Hong mines wisdom and wit out of a deftly presented and deceptively simple scenario: a young woman’s visits to three of her friends while her husband’s away. In insightful, unpredictable conversations with people at different points in ...
