10 Movies That Don't Deserve Their 100% Rotten Tomatoes Rating

8. My Beautiful Laundrette

If you're looking for a film which captures the social, political and racial tensions in Thatcher-era Britain, My Beautiful Laundrette would be as good a place as any to start. Starring Daniel Day Lewis in his breakthrough role and directed by Stephen Frears based on a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, it offers a broad and sometimes stirring portrait of a country in the throes of cultural upheaval.

Very much a character-driven film, My Beautiful Laundrette is often remembered today for Day Lewis's performance, which tends to overshadow the rest of the cast. This is an unfair and somewhat simplistic legacy, since the performances across the board are uniformly excellent. Kureishi's script encompasses everything from punk to poverty and Frears does a near-perfect job of holding all the threads together, and the sense of a society buying into the emerging "greed is good" philosophy of the era whilst trying at the same time to discover authentic connections with their fellow Londoners amidst the vacuous materialism is captured in the contrast between the aspirational middle class families and their working poor counterparts.

Nevertheless, My Beautiful Laundrette's origins as a television movie seeps through in the direction on more than one occasion, and while signs of such a low budget shouldn't be an immediate cause for criticism, the soap opera aesthetic sometimes detracts from the drama.

The broad social canvas also leads to some underdeveloped characterisation and at times the narrative feels rather scatter-shot, as if Frears were struggling to decide where emphasis should be given from time to time. Other older British films offering social commentary have dated far less.

What It Deserves: 88%