Hanif Kureishi was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1954, the son of a "Subcontinental" father (read: Pakistani) and an English mother. Growing up in the suburbs, he watched his father's obsessive efforts to write his way out of discrimination and obscurity -- efforts that went unrecognized outside the fami

Cool, Gritty, Post-colonial literature, Quirky, Urban

"Waaaake up!" yells DJ Mister Senor Love Daddy at the start of Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" -- a call to awareness that seems to be the message of all Lee's movies. Lee isn't interested in forcing any one ideology down his audience's throat; instead, he wants to expose us to the issues that preoc

African american fiction, In-your-face, Political, Urban

After Goebbels made him an offer he couldn't refuse without unpleasant repercussions, celebrated German director Fritz Lang fled the new Nazi regime rather than supervise National Socialist Party motion pictures. Lang, a member-in-good-standing of the German Gothic school of Expressionist cinema, cut

Dark, Dystopia and its discontents, Dystopic, Germans in hollywood, Machinistic, Mathematical, Urban

The nebbish persona of Woody Allen's early 1960s stand-up shtick proved to be the springboard that took this most unlikely New York neurotic into a serious career as a leading auteur of international cinema. In his first film, "What's New, Pussycat?" which he wrote and acted in, Allen presented the i

Anxiety, Contemplative, Moody, Neurotic, Parody, Perverse, Urban