Collab with Ziglet: avid Sayles aficionado, and a fine fellow indeed. Read his superb review here.

My third Sayles, and while it is a step down, it’s a small one. Perhaps I was spoiled starting with the singular Lone Star and the truly fascinating Limbo, both of which would arrive well over a decade after this, and, although they were still shot on relatively svelt budgets ‘Brother’ makes both movies look like Hollywood blockbusterish productions, and Sayles’ creative refinement is not quite what it’d become—both aesthetically and thematically—with that pair of later works. Still, while short on nuance and gloss, ‘Brother’ manages to function as well as it does precisely because of its shoestring allowance and lack of complexity. There is also a lot more humor than I expected, with Joe Morton delivering a rangy non-verbal performance chock-full of comedy, warmth, poignance, and physicality, covering nearly every human emotion, despite the fact that he is an alien, literally and, of course, metaphorically.

What works best here is how astutely Sayles points out the absurdity of such signifiers as “citizen” or “immigrant” and his exposition of the bureaucracies tasked with determining who is who. That, and an absolutely show-stopping moment featuring an almost-surreally sprightly Fisher Stevens as a waggish subway magician who has his cards spin yarns and can make all of the white people disappear anywhere past 125th street, including himself.