Dirty Pretty Things (2002)
Directed by Stephen Frears
An undocumented immigrant finds a human heart in one of the toilets of the west London hotel where he works with other undocumented immigrants.
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What critics compared Dirty Pretty Things to
Written by Dirty Pretty Things screenwriter Steven Knight, Eastern Promises plays at first like several films at once.
The script is by Steven Knight , author of the powerful " Dirty Pretty Things " (2002), about a black market in body parts.
Of course, London's underbelly is no stranger to writer Steven Knight who also penned 2002's superb illegal immigrant drama, "Dirty Pretty Things" .
The film hits you over the head with its magnificently written story (Steven Knight, of "Dirty Pretty Things"), not with a message.
David Knight's script for Eastern Promises is a thoroughly lackluster extension of the immigrant-underworld seediness he exploited in Dirty Pretty Things, but Cronenberg surveys Knight's borsht eatery of a thousand clich�s and locates a signature shot, the epicene blonde minstrel presenting "Ochi chyornye" to an ancient customer before her centennial cake.
The script, by the English writer Steven Knight ("Dirty Pretty Things"), was originally intended for British television.
Writer-director Knight, who provided the screenplays for Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things and David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, has said he chose Ivan’s Welsh accent (you’ll recognize the clipped musicality of Anthony Hopkins’s speech rhythms) to signal that Ivan is working-class, without sacrificing clarity for the mainstream-movie audience.
Writer/director Steven Knight’s scripts generally deal with social issues that concern the English working class (see: Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises), but his screenplay for Locke takes a more personal approach to examining the struggles (and, in turn, the moral values) of the modern blue-collar professional – allowing the film to have a more subtle political subtext, compared to some of Knight’s previous work.
But writer and director Steven Knight (screenwriter of “Eastern Promises” and “Dirty Pretty Things”) crafts an excellent, quickly paced script (clocking in at 125 minutes) built on real-life situations, and augments it with excellent direction.
Part of the brilliance of this utterly brilliant film by Steven Knight (who wrote the scripts for Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things ) is the way it turns mundanity into modernity.
As conceived by writer-director Steven Knight (screenwriter of Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises), Ivan Locke (Hardy) is certainly a sympathetic figure.
Steven Knight wrote the scripts for the movies Eastern Promises (by David Cronenberg) and Dirty Pretty Things (by Stephen Frears).
“If the traffic is OK, I should be there in an hour and a half,” Locke assures one of his many unseen conversation partners, and the movie—written and directed by Steven Knight (who wrote the scripts for David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises and Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things )—makes good on that promise, clocking in at 85 minutes of real time during which the camera never strays from Locke’s car, and rarely from Hardy’s face.
But The Terminal is film-festival offensive, encouraging its audience to coo over the adorable antics of its madcap cast of society's blue-collar "invisibles" (playing in this respect like the slick, imminently forgettable version of Stephen Frears' working class morality play Dirty Pretty Things ) in a way that isn't sympathetic so much as paternalistic.
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The screenplay by the talented Steven Knight (“Locke,” “Dirty Pretty Things,” “Eastern Promises”) propels the story, weaving bits of humor into the drama.
The screenplay, by Steven Knight (“Dirty Pretty Things,” “Locke”), frontloads the film with overtures for our sympathies by getting our hero into our good graces before he starts ranting about “the Jews.”
The real Fischer was taller than his opponent, and blonde, but director Ed Zwick (Glory)—working from a schematic script by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) and Stephen J. Rivele (Nixon)—sees this chess master as a kind of mousy everyman, cracking under the stress of competing ideologies.
As written by the reliable Steven Knight ("Dirty Pretty Things," "Locke") and directed by the veteran Edward Zwick, the film's straight-ahead approach matters less than the complete and utter strangeness of the true story it convincingly tells.
The movie is at its best when it dwells on the periphery of mainstream Berlin: the idea of Harris having to use the illegal immigrant society to make sense of himself — a dislocated man assisted by people who don’t want to be located while they toil in an underground economy, which Dirty Pretty Things dramatized so achingly.
Newlyweds Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor, "Dirty Pretty Things") and Juliet (Keira Knightley, "Pirates of the Caribbean") and their Best Man Mark (Andrew Lincoln, "The Jury").
Imagine the emotional problems when your best friend Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor, "Dirty Pretty Things") marries the girl of your dreams, Juliet (Keira Knightly).
“Allied” tells an absorbing story of trust, betrayal and deception, and Zemeckis — working from a script by “Dirty Pretty Things” and “Locke” screenwriter Steven Knight — keeps the action taut and nimble.
The film was written by Steven Knight , whose previous credits include such smart adult-oriented thrillers as “ Dirty Pretty Things ” and “ Eastern Promises ,” and he gives viewers an intelligent and twisty story that generally plays fair with them and keeps them guessing the truth about Marianne without ever getting too contrived or convoluted (though it does contain perhaps one more red herring than it can properly digest).
That may strike some viewers as a slightly stodgy turnoff — a fetishization of the past — but Zemeckis, working from a script by Steven Knight (“Dirty Pretty Things,” the amusing and underrated “Burnt”), is alive to what’s great about old movies: the supple, nearly invisible craft that allows scenes to throb with emotional suspense.
Zemeckis is a master of the big, broad Oscar-bait drama (Cast Away, Flight, The Walk), and he makes the most of a well-constructed screenplay by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises).
The major disappointment, however, is the flaccid screenplay by Steven Knight, who showed such a gift for detailing character and milieu in Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, and uncanny skill at building tension with audaciously minimalist means in Locke, which he also directed.
It is an intriguing premise and one that is handled well by screenwriter Steven Knight, who penned the superior thriller Eastern Promises and gritty urban drama Dirty Pretty Things.
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If In America walks the same tightrope as Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things , its heroes too saintly, its resolution too neat, it nonetheless has the advantage of knowing itself as a shrine to memories that time has recast as a limpid, lovely fantasy.
Okwe's world consists of meting out clap remedies to fellow cabbies, playing chess with his bemused mortician attendant buddy Guo Yi (Benedict Wong, "Spy Game") and casting a blind eye towards streetwalker Juliette (Sophie Okonedo, "Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls") and her jovial cab driver customer Ivan (Zlatko Buric, "Bleeder") who tryst in his hotel.