Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

Sammy and Rosie is not only the best British film of the year, it's one of the best films of the year from any country, period, a raucously erotic dirge belted into the gaping mouth of a tomb. [30 Oct 1987]

Sammy and Rosie has a fierce, scrambled intelligence. In this story about a group of interlocking characters in a London neighborhood on the fringe, Kureishi and Frears rack up all of their views on sex, politics, colonialism, social injustice and rebellion like balls in a game of pool, then send them flying. And they seem less interested in pocketing shots than in watching the balls ricochet and collide.

Sammy and Rosie is a writer's film, with all the pluses and minuses that go with that status. The language is marvelously clear and the structure exquisitely wrought; on the other hand, the film lacks the sense of discovery and spontaneity a more creative director might have brought to it.

Ambitious, unsettling, funny and perhaps too smart for its own good. With so much on its satirical agenda, it tends to spin out of orbit. [9 Nov 1987]

Made in a documentary manner as styled as a Hollywood musical, the movie is hyperconscious of art, of politics, of itself, and at times it's exasperatingly affectless.

Tossed together from a Hanif Kureishi screenplay which labours so many right-on themes that none leave their mark

Stunningly, ponderously bad.