An English film of astonishing freshness and emotional urgency.

| Jul 30, 2024

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

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

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

| Jan 4, 2018

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

This is a uniquely plausible portrait of life in England, yet its appeal isn't limited to social realism -- it also has a twist of buoyant fantasy and romance

| May 13, 2013

This new British picture raises enough issues for a half-dozen more conventional movies. And though this approach makes for a structure that's a little shaky, the film somehow holds together.

| May 13, 2013

Director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi are better at depicting a new milieu than in making an important or innovative statement.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 13, 2013

As always, director Stephen Frears does a superb job of work when given a good script, and this is a very good script.

| Jun 18, 2008

The strength of the film is its vision -- cutting, compassionate and sometimes hilarious -- of what it means to be Asian, and British, in Thatcher's Britain.

| Jun 24, 2006

While Personal Best and Making Love have faded into obscurity as The Celluloid Closet footnotes, My Beautiful Laundrette has become a benchmark in the 80s new queer cinema.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 31, 2003

A fascinating, eccentric, very personal movie.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 20, 2003

At times puzzling due to the diverse panorama of subject matter, the film nevertheless corners touchy issues more than it flinches them.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 25, 2001

It is with some relief that we realize it isn't "about" anything; it's simply some weeks spent with some characters in a way that tells us more about some aspects of modern Britain than we've seen before.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000