Metacritic reviews

The grandest and most vigorous movie he's (Frears) made in at least a decade. Like Okwe himself, it rises above its limitations, and it's just a little bit bigger than the landscape around it.

This is a film that insinuates itself deeply into our awareness. It's that rare pulp story with something on its mind, an unnerving, socially conscious thriller with a killer sense of narrative drive.

All told, the best ensemble cast I've seen this year.

Once again, Frears -- who has enjoyed a glorious run of diverse, good-quality movies, from "My Beautiful Laundrette" to "High Fidelity" -- has crafted a unique gem.

It's a dark and revealing movie, and, while the ending may not be upbeat enough for those expecting mainstream fare, it offers a measure of hope and a catharsis.

The strength of the thriller genre is that it provides stories with built-in energy and structure. The weakness is that thrillers often seem to follow foreseeable formulas. Frears and his writer, Steve Knight, use the power of the thriller and avoid the weaknesses in giving us, really, two movies for the price of one.

The poetic justice strains the verisimilitude of a film otherwise grounded in a tough reality, but there is a guilty satisfaction to it all.

The thriller aspect of this work, happily, doesn't overshadow its real beauty -- its stark portrayal of the nightmare despair of aliens, hunted, on edge, prepared to risk all for a new start.

Slick and sober, fiercely contemporary, and rigged by a fail-safe three-act structure, Dirty Pretty Things nimbly straddles the line between realism and popcorn pop, but it knows which side its bread is buttered on.

Though worth seeing, should be better than it is.