Dirty Pretty Things

Director Stephen Frears returns to the grittier themes of his earlier films for the urban thriller Dirty Pretty Things. Residing in London, the medically trained Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a Nigerian immigrant working as a taxi driver and a hotel concierge, but he still lives on the edge of poverty. ...more

After biding time between glossy Hollywood productions and U.K. domestic comedy-dramas, director Stephen Frears returns to the multiethnic, working-class milieu that served his seminal early work, with inspired results. Dirty Pretty Things is that rarest of beasts, the sort of thing only the British can produce: the proletariat mystery-thriller. Former game-show impresario Steve Knight delivers a script that adheres to all the standard tenets of the paranoid thriller, but where he, Frears, and ...more