Last Exit to Brooklyn

Name: Last Exit to Brooklyn
Director: Uli Edel
Released: 1989

Uli Edel

1989

Synopsis

A gallery of characters in Brooklyn in the 1950s are crushed by their surroundings and selves: a union strike leader discovers he is gay; a prostitute falls in love with one of her clients; a family cannot cope with the fact that their daughter is illegitimately pregnant.

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Recommendations

88
Chicago Sun-Times
These are fellow human beings who suffer, who are limited in their freedom to imagine greater happiness for themselves, and yet in their very misery they embody human striving. There is more of humanity in a prostitute trying to truly love, if only for a moment, than in all of the slow-motion romantic fantasies in the world.
80
Time Out
Not a comfortable film, but humane and savagely beautiful.
80
TV Guide Magazine
In blending the personal worlds of these characters into a complete cosmology of the abyss, director Uli Edel (Christiane F.) and scriptwriter Desmond Nakano have transformed Selby's episodic book into an aesthetic whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
80
The New York Times
Though Last Exit to Brooklyn is bleak, the gloom is never trivial. The effect, instead, is elegiac.
80
Los Angeles Times
Edel’s empathy with actors--which he showed in 1981 with the harrowing heroin saga, Christiane F.--is further strengthened by the remarkable performances here.
60
Empire
Despite feeling narratively let off the leash, Last Exit retains the passion of the novel, as well as the switch-blade characterisation.
60
Chicago Reader
Edel's stylized mise en scene purposefully frames and distances much of the action; but despite his obvious sincerity and goodwill, and the intrinsic interest of a very European handling of an American subject, the movie's bleakness and despair aren't accompanied by the unified vision that this sort of material requires.
50
Washington Post
Edel, who supposedly fell in love with the novel as a Munich film student in the late '60s, has finally realized his adaptive dream. But for someone so devoted to the book, he (with screenwriter Desmond Nakano) ultimately betrays the novel's unrelenting brutality, its unshakably misanthropic point of view.