An English film of astonishing freshness and emotional urgency.

| Jul 30, 2024

The themes are familiar, but writer Hanif Kuerishi refuses to simplify the issues and director Steven Frears uses an interesting visual style to explore another seamy side of life.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 27, 2024

Watching [My Beautiful Laundrette] smash taboos and break new ground in all the ways it does decades later, you can’t help but lament that movies this clever and complex and radical in their focuses aren't more commonplace now.

| Oct 21, 2023

It’s an enormous pleasure to see a movie that’s really about something, and that doesn’t lay on any syrupy coating to make the subject go down easily.

| Sep 13, 2023

It’s a grungy yet dynamic portrait of race and prejudice in the Thatcher-era London of East Indian immigrants and neo-Nazi gangs.

| Jan 7, 2023

A brutally funny social comedy about the racial and social consequences of a Pakistani and an Englishman going into business and becoming lovers.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 27, 2021

Daniel Day-Lewis enjoyed a breakout year stateside thanks to his contrasting performances here and as a supercilious dandy in A Room with a View.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 28, 2020

Despite its irregularities, the film is worth watching. It is lively and truthful. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Mar 10, 2020

Not only is it a brilliant take on star-crossed lovers, it doesn't take the twists and turns you'd expect a story like this to take.

| Feb 11, 2020

"My Beautiful Laundrette" is quirky and fresh and ambitious and pretty much everything a movie should be, except good.

| Jan 4, 2018

Would that all socially relevant cinematic documents were also such good movies!

| Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 4, 2016

Besides being revelatory in its depiction of a gay relationship, its respectful, yet unfawning, look at immigrants trying to make it in a new country is straight out of the headlines.

| Aug 17, 2016

How many times in the history of the medium have we seen a single film rattle as many socio-cinematic paradigms-and done it with as much brio-as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)?

| Nov 18, 2015

... unfolds with a refreshing honesty and a sense of surprise to it; being handled more like something embedded within the characters rather than a plot point thrown in just to bring up an issue or an easy conflict point.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 7, 2015

The odious Margaret Thatcher and her crippling policies made sizable targets for many British filmmakers during the 1980s and beyond, and few hit the bulls-eye as squarely as screenwriter Hanif Kureishi and director Stephen Frears with this indie hit.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 8, 2015

This seminal 1980s movie launched a plethora of now distinguished careers, including those of director Stephen Frears and Daniel Day-Lewis.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 13, 2013

It's Daniel Day Lewis, taut, intelligent, erotic, who is an emerging star.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 13, 2013

Fast, bold, harsh and primitive like a prodigious student film with equal parts promise and threat.

| May 13, 2013

There isn't a performance in this film that is less than excellent.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 13, 2013

Expertly acted throughout, this remains a definitive snapshot of British life in the 1980s.

| May 13, 2013