SOURCE: “The Sound of Silence,” in New Statesman & Society, December 13, 1991, pp. 30-1.

In the following negative review, Romney asserts that London Kills Me “falls because it has precious little to say about characters who have precious little to say.”

Hanif Kureishi’s London Kills Me is not a pop film as such, although you might expect it to be. The published script is accompanied by a eulogy to the Beatles, in which Kureishi is at pains to stress pop’s status as “the richest cultural form in postwar Britain”, and to locate writing in relation to that form: “It is pop that has spoken of ordinary experience with far more precision, real knowledge and wit than, say, British fiction of the equivalent period. And you can’t dance to fiction.”

With impressively recherché soundtrack credits and a grittily streetwise array of non-haircuts, you would expect the film—set...