The bicontinental British filmmaker Stephen Frears returns to the milieu of his Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and My Beautiful Laundrette -- the London melting pot, but this time in the grimmer mood of a Thirties-style social drama (the Warners studio, most typically), with a rough, raw, skinned-knuckle image and a crowding, collaring, buttonholing camera. The puckered-browed protagonist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a Nigerian illegal who works days as a cab driver -- his training in his homeland as a doctor obliges him to examine and treat his fellow cabbies for VD -- and works nights as a hotel desk clerk. (He sleeps never.) In the latter capacity, a ghastly discovery in an overflowing toilet on the fifth floor -- a breath-stopping scene -- leads him down a trail into a black-market trade in internal organs and forged passports: or, if you prefer, into an overwrought metaphor for the plight of the illegal. There is also a girl in the picture, a Turkish Muslim (Audrey Tautou) who works in the hotel as a chambermaid and has a huge crush on the hero. The mixed chorus of immigrants -- prominently Spanish, Chinese, and Russian in addition to the nationalities already mentioned -- affords an interesting framework, but the fill-in is luridly melodramatized and sentimentalized, as if the only answer to xenophobia were an equally rabid xenophilia. The plaintiveness of the two principals stands unsurpassed on the streets of London since Broken Blossoms, and the cartoonish menace of the immigration cops and the swinish sweatshop boss is unsurpassed since Dickens. The climax indulges our sympathies to cloying extremes. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd