SOURCE: “Buddy Flicks,” in New York, July 12, 1999, pp. 49-50.

In the following review, Rainer gives a brief plot summary of My Son the Fanatic.

Parvez (Om Puri), the middle-aged Pakistani cabdriver in the marvelous My Son the Fanatic, moved to the industrial north of England 25 years ago with his wife, Minoo (Gopi Desai), and, against the evidence of his eyes, still sees his adopted country as a fabled and pleasant place. He’s a naïf who has internalized the rewards of Empire far more than have the native English. When his only child, Farid (Akbar Kurtha), who still lives at home, drops his white fiancée, forsakes his possessions, and becomes an Islamic fundamentalist, Parvez is stung by this renunciation of his own dream; at first he thinks the boy must be on drugs.

Hanif Kureishi, who wrote the screenplay based on his New Yorker short story...