The Brother from Another Planet

Joe Morton as the Brother

1984’s The Brother from Another Planet is a smart, funny, smallscale sci-fi movie about an alien who crashlands in New York. In some respects it’s a sibling movie to 1976’s The Man Who Fell to Earth – weird dude with special gifts has a mixed time of it on planet Earth. Because the alien resembles a black man, the movie is often seen as some gigantic metaphor for the black experience in the USA but beyond the fact of the dude’s alienness, it’s a reading that doesn’t yield much more than the movie on a surface level is already delivering. It goes about its business as a series of slice-of-life vignettes about daily … Read more