SparkMore n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

gavin6942 A mute alien (Joe Morton) with the appearance of a black human is chased by outer-space bounty hunters through the streets of Harlem.If this film had been made five years earlier, it might have fallen into the blaxploitation trap. But, luckily, this is not the case because it is above and beyond blaxploitation and in many ways far more clever. Rather than dwell on race, it just sort of accepts it.There is the theme of immigration, though it is not heavy-handed and the viewer can choose to see this as a parable or not. They can choose to see it as science fiction or not. (Obviously it is, but it is light.) There is plenty of room for a viewer to imprint his or her own thoughts on to the story and make it their own.Bonus: Fisher Stevens shows up.

ccthemovieman-1 Can you say "different?" Have often do you see a movie in which the lead character never utters one word?That's the case here, a unique story of an alien who crashes near Harlem, a famous black neighborhood in New York City. The alien is a black man, so he fits in despite not being able to speak! He's just looked upon as another "brother," as the title indicates.Two aliens come after him - white guys, naturally. In the Liberal world of films, white people are bad and black people are good 99 percent of the time.....at least when there is a contrast between the two. Writer-director John Sayles is a prime example of this type of racist thinking. But he wrote a fun film here, I have to give him that.Even though some of the scenes make absolutely no sense, it's an entertaining movie start- to-finish. Joe Morton plays the sympathetic alien with three toes and strange nails. You have to root for him because he's portrayed as such an innocent, harmless creature.The best part of the film is the humor, some subtle, some not-so-subtle. The guys in the neighborhood bar where the alien hangs out brought the biggest laughs.I find this a lot of fun to watch every three or four years.

preppy-3 An alien from outer space (Joe Morton) crash lands in NY. He looks like a black man, is totally mute and can fix machines and heal wounds with his bare hands. He's taken in by the citizens of Harlem who grow to like him...but he's being followed by two men in black (John Sayles and David Stratham) who want to bring him back to outer space.An interesting change of pace for director/writer and editor John Sayles...but it doesn't really work. I caught this in 1984 at an art cinema and was pretty unimpressed. My thoughts haven't really changed much. There's no real plot...just Morton wandering around and meeting all these odd but always friendly people. The dialogue is great and Morton is excellent (that's why I'm giving it a 6) but the rest of the acting is pretty bad (except for Sayles and Stratham) and nothing really happens. It just sort of lays there. It also leads to a real ambiguous ending which could be interpreted a number of different ways. Still, this was the kind of independent film that came out in the 1980s and 90s before Hollywood took them over. For that alone this is interesting to watch. It has been beautifully restored by the Anarchists Covention (???) and UCLA. It looks better now than it did in 1984!

a-d-d-iva-1 This film has been a favorite of mine since I first saw it. The Brother from Another Planet was featured at the French-American film festival in my temporary hometown of Avignon, France in the spring/summer of 1984, and I saw it in the Utopia theater there, a venue equal to this enchanting, unusual film. My own situation informed my viewing; as I had recently graduated from college and flown to France to work for the summer (before heading into "the 'real' world"), Brother spoke to me about life as a foreigner "without a voice." I was self-conscious about my French and had chosen to spend my early weeks there silently observing. The parallels were too many to enumerate. My reactions were visceral; I appreciated the situations more than had I been viewing with a majority American audience. Separate from my personal perspective, however, I believe the film depicts a wonderful cross-section of characters who were simultaneously of their era and archetypal; I enjoyed "meeting" the compendium the Brother met and seeing them through his eyes. Joe Morton was skilled at communicating without words, conveying emotion and thoughtfulness in his character's truly alien environment. The interplanetary bounty hunters, my personal favorites, were clearly inspirations for the later "Men in Black" feature franchise. I'm glad I saw them before MIB debuted. There was nothing formulaic about this story. Sayles' fresh approach made me into a lifelong fan; he is a storyteller whose tales are always worth the trip. For a film with the potential for both scintillating discussion or simply quirky-but-never-shallow entertainment, check out The Brother.