living color movie review

15 Best In Living Color Characters

‘In Living Color’ is an American sketch comedy series created by Keenen Ivory Wayans that aired on Fox between April 1990 to May 1994. During an era where white actors dominated the successful comedy sketches such as ‘Saturday Night Live,’ this series boasted the main cast of black stars and helped to introduce black humor to the rest of America and the world.

Not only was the iconic show a fan favorite, but it also aided in launching the careers of tons of stars, including Keenen’s brothers Damon, Shawn, and Marlon, as well as funny guy acclaimed actor Jim Carrey as well as multitalented star Jamie Foxx. The same series introduced popstar Jennifer Lopez to the world as she was part of The Fly Girls girl band that performed in between the sketches back then.

‘In Living Color’ is one of those shows which, regardless of how much time passes by, one can’t sideline its importance in setting up the foundation for shows in its genre that came after it. Many characters are still beloved by fans of the program to date, but which ones are the best? Stay with us because we will be ranking the top 15 ‘In Living Color’ characters of all time.

15. Amy Fisher

Closing the ranks is Amy Fisher, played by Ali Wentworth, who officially joined the cast in 1993 after brief appearances in the first and second installments. Fisher was a fantastic portrayal of a New York City tabloid bad girl with her elegant performances on her skit on the show Super Bimbo becoming one of the most excellent performances in the show’s history.

14. Cheap Pete

Cheap Pete is the ridiculously economical guy who appeared in the show from 1993 till 1994, embodied by Chris Rock. Rumor had it then that Rock was fired from Saturday Night Live when the producers learned that he was planning to jump ship to the ‘In Living Color.’

Sadly, the show was canceled shortly after he joined the cast, but his performance left a lasting impression nevertheless, and he soon picked up his pieces, becoming one of the greatest comedians in showbiz.

13. Frenchie

Keenen, the creator of the show, usually let his talent take center stage to show off their skills and was mainly pulling the strings from behind the scenes. But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t put on his acting boots and step back in front of the camera when occasions called for it.

He was particularly perfect as the good-looking French guy Frenchie who loved to party and dress up like a pimp while dropping lines in the most romantic language on planet Earth. His looks and swag are something that can’t quickly fade away from memory, especially for die-hard fans.

12. Benita Burrell

There is that one person in the community who is friendly with everybody else and pretends to be the most caring person the world has ever known. Still, once you let them in on your secrets, they shamelessly air your dirty laundry in public without a care in the world.

This hilarious character in this show was played by Wayans sister Kim who was always ready with the 411 around the block as long as you didn’t quote her as your source of the juicy gossip. 

The memorable, extremely confident, facially deformed, sassy Wanda was a part that was made intriguing by Jamie Foxx’s performances that added an extra flair to the show making an obviously cringy moment into a hilarious one. The results were the creation of an iconic original character that was loved by many.

10. Tom and Tom (Brothers Brothers)

There are those few people in the black community who are such white supremacists to the extent that every single stereotype crafted about black people is true to them regardless of whether it’s based on facts.

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‘In Living Color’ the Brothers Tom Brothers and Tom Brothers played by Damon and Keenen are the country-song duo who believe Black people blabber too much about their problems. They are the whitest black people in the show’s hood.

9. Home Shopping Network

Again, embodied by Damon and Keenen, this duo poses as hustlers in a Home Shopping network parody. They come up with all sorts of creative ways to cheat their way into people’s money and shamelessly swindle the gullible masses in the most hilarious ways until, well, the long arm of the law catches up with them.

8. Grandpa Jack McGee

This show, of course, gave superstar Jim Carrey a head start into a highly successful film career. His portrayal of the always drunk, foul-mouthed, suicidal, hot-tempered grandpa Jack McGee who dared pass across jumbled-up editions of everyday home activities in his state, was astounding.

His love for pork and beans, his behavior, and as well as loose cannon antics made him quite memorable.

7. Anton Jackson

Coming in at number seven is Anton Jackson, a role by Damon, who is one of those characters who will not only effortlessly make you sprawl on the ground with laughter but also cringe in disgust at the same time.

He is a homeless man who likes enjoying the finer things in life, which is quite nasty as his presumed good life includes picking his nose and using the boogers to stick things together. He also loves to show people his portable toilet. Yaak!

6. Oswald Bates

Oswald Bates is that one person who thinks that he is so intelligent, while the fact is that he doesn’t know as much as he thinks and keeps using the wrong English words in the most hideous and unrelated contexts.

He is an inmate who, if he weren’t an already convicted felon, then the inventors of the English language would definitely sue him for massacring the queen’s language. Damon once more lends this character his body leaving behind the most nonsensical gut-wrenching dialogue on th entire show.

5. Calhoun Tubbs

Calhoun Tubbs might not be the most hilarious character ‘In Living Color,’ but he sure did leave a lasting impression with his irritable, rude tunes and catchphrases. When he wasn’t tormenting convicts with his performances, he was busy traumatizing innocent kids at birthday parties. David Alan Grier played this self-proclaimed star.

4. Vera De Milo

Jim Carrey took on different characters during his five-year reign in the series. Another of his iconic performances was as fitness enthusiast Vera De Milo.

The character was presented as a woman blessed with a pretty husky voice who loved to flex and use plenty of steroids, which made her performances hilariously ridiculous. Everything about her, not to mention that she used to neigh occasionally, makes it hard to forget such a personality.

3. Blaine Edwards and Anton Mayweather

In the period during which ‘In Living Color’ aired, people were not overly concerned about correcting political views and perspectives. For instance, the recurring character of a physically challenged superhero named Handi-Man would have been cringe-worthy in today’s viewership.

The show then introduces two flamboyant gay men who loved to discuss everything about movies. It is evident that the roles are stereotypical; however, the way they execute the dialogue and how the sketch was framed is fantastic. It is almost impossible to keep a straight face while watching this duo played by Damon and Grier.

2. Fire Marshall Bill 

There is no doubt that Jim Carrey is fantastic when it comes to delivering hard comedy hence why his Fire Marshall Bill character takes up the runners-up spot as everything about him is impressive. He is the epitome of a wacky character who looks like the walking dead with half of his mouth missing and physically demonstrates safety dangers on himself.

He is that one maniac who will go at any length to put his point across, including dismembering his own hand and blowing up structures. His psycho-like mannerisms and the surrealness of it all make this character stand out from the many others that have graced the show.

1. Homey D Clown

And we are on to the winner. Clinching the top spot of the most memorable ‘In Living Color’ characters is Homey D Clown, played by Damon Wayans. This clown is the reason why children are terrified by his kind. He is violent, insults everything that moves, is unfriendly and withdrawn, and exceptionally grumpy.

He isn’t there to brighten anyone’s mood but to just fulfill his community service obligations. He is like the perfect embodiment of a pretty bad Santa Claus.

It’s been over three decades since ‘In Living Color’ was launched, which sadly could have probably transversed unimaginable boundaries if Fox didn’t fall out with Keenen, the mastermind behind this masterpiece.

Either way, the show received rave reviews and introduced some of the greatest entertainers in the modern day to the world. A majority of the cast members are doing pretty well both in film and music, which is just one of the many positive things that came out of the show.

Hrvoje, based in Osijek, Croatia, with a Master's degree from the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, is a co-founder of Incomera, a media company that has launched several entertainment sites including Fiction Horizon. Additionally, he is a co-owner of Comic Basics and Voice Film. Hrvoje's writing career began in 2016 when he started writing for a Croatian film website he founded, Svijet Filma. Over the years, his work has been featured on LifeWire, Yahoo, and IMDb, among others. He is also the author of a cyberpunk neo-noir detective book titled 'Echoes of Tomorrow'. His favorite movies include 300, Conan, Alien, The Lord of the Rings, MCU, and Stargate franchises. His favorite shows are Doctor Who, Only Fools and Horses, Stargate, Seinfeld, Sherlock, Everybody Loves Raymond, Fringe, Poirot, Spartacus, and Rome.

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Bill Nighy is a fun, uninhibited actor, but there’s an abashed, melancholy quality to him that hasn’t been fully explored until “Living,” a drama about a senior citizen reckoning with his life. 

Nighy became an unlikely star playing a dissolute, clownish old rocker in “Love, Actually,” and he’s been aces in a series of character parts and second leads ever since. You never find unnecessary or inorganic flourishes in his acting: he’s a pro who goes in and gets it done, whatever the role’s parameters. He’s an active listener whose characters seem to be having their own thoughts on everything happening. His unassuming presence makes you feel at least some affection for whomever he’s playing, even if they’re coded as unsympathetic. 

The post-World War II London drama “Living” puts Nighy at the center of a story: he plays Williams, the head of the Public Works Department, who receives a terminal health diagnosis and, after a period of shock, begins taking stock in his life and essentially trying to be the best person he can before he goes. It’s a role that calls for subtlety, and director Oliver Hermanus has the right leading man.

Williams is an archetypal figure: a bowler-hatted functionary for the state who’s been doing the same thing and living the same life forever. Nighy is 73, old enough to have grandparents who were adults in the 19th century. He seems to understand from firsthand observations that people of different centuries (or parts of centuries) had different energies and ways of comporting themselves than those born 50 or 100 years later. You can picture Williams as someone for whom automobiles and planes were staggering new developments and who has seen so much change in his life that stability has become increasingly important. 

He’s a creature of habit. He takes the train into the city, works, takes the train back home, goes to bed, and repeats. His new boss is ineffective, and the department is largely indifferent to the needs of its employees (a group of female workers is making no headway getting a small playground constructed, and Williams notices but doesn’t intervene). The character has been on rails his whole life. The only female employee of his department, Margaret ( Aimee Lou Wood ), calls him “Mr. Zombie.” When his doctor tells him he has only a few more months to live, his response is an unwitting parody of stiff-upper-lip comportment: “Quite.” 

“Living” is a loose adaptation/remake of Akira Kurosawa’s “ Ikiru ” (aka “ To Live “), a post-World War II drama about a Tokyo bureaucrat who goes on a similar journey after a terminal diagnosis of gastric cancer. “Living” isn’t a great movie—it’s a little too subdued at times and has a tendency to fixate on Williams’ mostly unarticulated sadness—but it’s consistently involving. 

And Nighy’s performance is such a marvel of quiet strength and internalized complexity that, even though you’re never in doubt as to how Williams will rise to the occasion of his tragic news (a pub crawl, a relationship with a woman that looks like love to outsiders, a decision to intervene to help others make things happen) the events still feel spontaneous rather than telegraphed. 

With its theme of a repressed Englishman deciding to finally let go and live a bit, the movie feels like a holdover from that great run of Merchant-Ivory movies art-house films about repression and roads not taken that became both critical and box-office hits in the 1980s and ’90s: “ A Room with a View ,” “ Maurice ,” “ Howards End ,” and “Remains of the Day.” The latter was based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro , who has long cited “Ikiru” as a primary influence on his writing, and whose stories of repressed white English people of earlier eras channeled and stood proudly alongside the works of E.M. Forster—and suggested a strange continuity between the ritualized English and Japanese ways of dealing with intense emotion (as well as the mandate to keep sadness to oneself). Ishiguro wrote the screenplay for “Living.” 

The result feels like a bridging work between certain types of novels and movies, and two cultures, in much the same way that Kurosawa’s remakes of Shakespeare and other nations’ directors’ remakes of Kurosawa (such as “A Fistful of Dollars”) did so long ago. When people in show business say that cinema speaks a universal language, they’re often pumping themselves up or selling something. But under the right circumstances, the truth of the assertion is undeniable, and movies like this are an example. 

Now playing in theaters. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• Bill Nighy as Mr Williams
• Aimee Lou Wood as Margaret
• Alex Sharp as Mr Wakeling
• Tom Burke as Mr Sutherland
• Adrian Rawlins as Middleton
• Oliver Chris as Hart
• Michael Cochrane as Sir James
• Zoe Boyle as Mrs McMasters
• Lia Williams as Mrs Smith
• Richard Cunningham as Harvey

Writer (original screenplay)

• Akira Kurosawa
• Chris Wyatt
• Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch

Cinematographer

• Jamie Ramsay
• Kazuo Ishiguro
• Oliver Hermanus

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Review: If you doubted the greatness of Bill Nighy, a moving new drama offers ‘Living’ proof

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Not long into “Living,” Mr. Williams learns that he has not long to live. The news doesn’t come as a huge shock, but even if it did, you gather, nothing about this man — not his stiff posture, his calmly appraising gaze or his thin, flat line of a mouth — would betray anything resembling devastation or even surprise. We are in 1950s London, and Mr. Williams, who’s spent more than two decades toiling away in the county hall’s Public Works department, has encased himself in a shell of propriety, receiving every new document and file with unfailing politeness and unflappable calm. Why should his response to his own demise — in six months to a year, max — be any different?

Here it should be noted that Mr. Williams is played by Bill Nighy, for whom a show of restraint is never just a show of restraint. Within emotional parameters that other actors might have found gloomily constricting, Nighy coaxes forth a tour de force of understatement, suffused with an almost musical melancholy. His performance, which won a lead acting prize from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. earlier this month, is a gorgeous minor-key symphony of downcast gazes and soft-spoken pronouncements, lightened occasionally by a faint little ghost of a smile. There’s a whisper of humor to Mr. Williams, a sense of irony about a death sentence that he keeps secret from all but a trusted few. In the movie’s best moments, Nighy lures you into the impression that he’s sharing a private joke with you, a glimmer of comic insight into an unbearably sad situation.

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At one point you might flash back to “Love Actually,” specifically a line from one of Nighy’s funniest, most famous performances : “And now I’m left with no one, wrinkled and alone!” But Mr. Williams is not one for flamboyant self-pity, and “Living,” thankfully, will never be mistaken for “Life Actually.” Exquisitely directed by Oliver Hermanus from a spare, elegant script by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, the movie is a faithful English-language reimagining of “Ikiru,” Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film about a Tokyo widower who receives a terminal stomach-cancer diagnosis and turns over a startling new leaf.

An emotional epic situated between more sweeping Kurosawa classics (it was made after “Rashomon” and right before “Seven Samurai” ), “Ikiru” remains sufficiently revered that the mere thought of a remake might draw cries of sacrilege. But it is also, like so many of Kurosawa’s films, a culturally permeable, infinitely adaptable story. (“Ikiru” itself was loosely drawn from Leo Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”) Its lessons about the finity of existence and the beauty of living for the good of others are nothing if not universally applicable, something that could also be said of its withering indictment of government bureaucracy.

In “Living,” that bureaucracy has been transplanted to postwar London and visualized as a sea of gray pinstripe suits and bowler hats, flowing through wood-paneled offices and up and down marbled stairwells. It’s an almost distractingly beautiful vision of workplace tedium, thanks to the impeccable cut of Sandy Powell’s costumes, the polish of Helen Scott’s production design and the deep colors and sharply planed images of Jamie Ramsay’s cinematography. Our first impressions of the place, and of Mr. Williams himself, come by way of a new Public Works hire, Peter Wakeling (an excellent Alex Sharp). His cheery disposition and idealistic spirit are swiftly tempered by the realization of what their work, if that’s the word, entails.

The building is a well-ordered monument to inefficiency, where papers are duly stored and shuffled around, and anyone in need of personal assistance is immediately referred to the next department over. The satire of public administration is much the same as it was in “Ikiru,” down to the series of wipes used here (by editor Chris Wyatt) to follow a group of women on their fruitless, frustrating quest to convert a bomb site into a children’s playground. But Ishiguro has also streamlined the material and sanded down some of its rougher edges, in keeping with a sensibility that feels governed by a quintessentially (or perhaps just stereotypically) English reserve. In “Ikiru,” a doctor lies to his terminally ill patients, claiming they only have an ulcer; in “Living,” bad news is delivered and processed with the stiffest of upper lips.

That makes for a trimmer narrative (40 minutes shorter than the original), if also one that, for those who’ve seen “Ikiru,” might feel a touch muffled and overly circumscribed as it sends Mr. Williams off in search of existential answers. Away he goes from the office where he has never missed a day’s work until now, with nary a word to his colleagues or to his unsuspecting, self-absorbed son (Barney Fishwick) and daughter-in-law (Patsy Ferran). His chance encounter with a worldly pleasure seeker (Tom Burke) is diverting enough, though their guided tour of arcades and nightclubs has been conspicuously denuded of suspense or menace. More affecting are Mr. Williams’ moments with a soon-to-be-former colleague, Margaret Harris (a delightful Aimee Lou Wood), whose warmth and good humor make her an ideal if accidental confidant.

Their tender rapport is one of the story’s pleasures — a reminder that the gradual forging of a bond between near-strangers, truthful and unhurried, can be one of the simplest and most powerful things to witness in a movie. Their meetings also never rise above a polite simmer, which is true of nearly everything that transpires in “Living,” death included. In “Ikiru,” the great Takashi Shimura externalized his character’s desperation with enormous, wide-open eyes and a drooping stare. Nighy forges something more mysterious, almost subterranean, from Mr. Williams’ crisis and sudden reawakening.

That might make the movie sound more anemic than it plays, as if it were a story about the meaning of life with barely enough life surging through its own veins. But if “Living” never matches — or tries to match — the grit and density of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, it knows that detachment can be deceptive, that it can conceal profound and resonant depths of feeling. Ishiguro, who knows a thing or two about the subtle braiding of Japanese and English sensibilities, has mastered the art of such concealment in his own fiction, notably his famously filmed novel “The Remains of the Day.” Hermanus, a South African filmmaker known for his tense and powerful dramas of gay desire (“Beauty,” “Moffie” ), has similar form when it comes to dramatizing repression.

Their economy comes to fruition in the third act of “Living,” which shrewdly restructures the story’s closing scenes with no loss of impact, and with an assertion of its own singular identity. That’s to the good of a movie that knows Mr. Williams’ example is somehow both admirable and inimitable, that the difference between an ordinary life and an extraordinary one can only be measured within a set of specific, unrepeatable circumstances. It’s only human to pretend we would behave as our heroes would, and no less human to long to see and hear their stories retold.

Rated: PG-13, for some suggestive material and smoking Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 23 at Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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‘Living’ Review: Less Is More in This Exceptionally Understated Turn From Bill Nighy

The charismatic English actor dials it back in this remake of Akira Kurosawa’s meaning-of-life classic 'Ikiru,' adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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“What would you do if you had six months left to live?” asks the doctor who diagnoses a do-nothing bureaucrat with terminal cancer in “Ikiru,” a 1952 masterpiece I suspect precious few of those who see its English-language remake, “ Living ,” will recall. Quite unlike anything else in Akira Kurosawa’s career, “Ikiru” ranks among the Japanese director’s best: With no samurai battles or set-pieces, the low-key contemporary melodrama raises profound questions about how we choose to spend the limited time we’re afforded, focusing on a stoic functionary about whom even the narrator apologizes, “He might as well be a corpse.”

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Nighy’s career has enjoyed an almost two-decade second act, and it’s possible to imagine the BAFTA winner scooping up a fresh shelf of trophies for this performance. “Living” is undeniably moving, although perhaps not to the same degree that Kurosawa achieved, in part because Ishiguro is so committed to the British art of biting one’s tongue and swallowing one’s emotions. That is to say, Ishiguro has aligned “Ikiru” with his best-known work, “The Remains of the Day.” That book — whose title alludes to what time we have left — concerned a butler so committed to his post that he allowed the love of his life to slip him by.

“Living” introduces Mr. Williams through the eyes of a new hire, Peter Wakeling (Alex Sharp), as yet uncorrupted by the office’s practiced art of dodging responsibility. With their neatly tailored suits and matching bowler hats, the paper pushers in Public Works seem to have realized that sticking their necks out is the surest way to lose their heads — initiative endangers their jobs — and so, they spend their days referring cases to other departments. The goal, while hardly Hippocratic, is to “do no harm.” The result is that they do no good either.

In Peter, Mr. Williams recognizes a younger version of himself. This character, invented by Ishiguro, lends a Dickensian dimension to the retelling: Mr. Williams is hardly as selfish as Ebenezer Scrooge, but like the old miser of “A Christmas Carol,” he’s squandered his days. Too oblivious to know what he doesn’t know, Peter provides Mr. Williams with a unique opportunity to pass on what he realized too late. Similarly, a young employee who’d left the office before it could crush her, Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood), suggests the kind of woman he probably ought to have married.

Mr. Williams does have a son, Michael (Barney Fishwick), but he can’t bring himself to tell the lad about his diagnosis — and besides, he and his girlfriend Fiona (Patsy Ferran) act as if he’s already dead. They’re already making plans for their inheritance. But who can blame them? As Margaret points out, Mr. Williams goes through life like a zombie. And so the dying man keeps the news to himself, withdrawing half his savings and heading to the seaside, where he intends to cram some fun into his final days. In what could easily be the film’s most pathetic line, Mr. Williams winces when a stranger (Tom Burke) tells him to “live a little,” confessing, “I don’t know how.”

Building a playground won’t change the world. But it will change Mr. Williams. When he dies (surprisingly early in the film), his family and co-workers are left to wonder why this project should have meant so much to him. We know more than they do, of course. Though it stacks endings upon endings in an effort to wring tears, the film is wise to leave some things unanswered. “Living” isn’t nearly as subtle as it purports to be, although it can feel that way, considering how much these characters hold back — and this, one supposes, is what audiences want from an Ishiguro script.

Reviewed online, Sundance Film Festival (Premieres), Jan. 21, 2022. Running time: 102 MIN.

• Production: (U.K.) A Film 4, County Hall Arts presentation, in association with Lip Sync, Rocket Science, Kurosawa Prod. of a Woolley/Karlsen, Number 9 Films production, in co-production with Filmgate Films, Film i Väst. (World sales: Rocket Science, London; CAA Media Finance, Los Angeles.) Producers: Stephen Woolley, Elizabeth Karlsen. Executive producers: Norman Merry, Peter Hampden, Sean Wheelan, Thorsten Schumacher, Emma Berkofsky, Ko Kurosawa, Ollie Madden, Daniel Battsek, Kazuo Ishiguro, Nik Powell, Kenzo Okamoto, Ian Prior. Co-executive producer: Kristina Börjenson. Co-producer: Jane Hooks.
• Crew: Director: Oliver Hermanus. Screenplay: Kazuo Ishiguro, based on Akira Kurosawa’s film “Ikiru,” written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni. Camera: Jamie D. Ramsay. Editor: Chris Wyatt. Music: Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch.
• With: Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp, Tom Burke, Adrian Rawlins, Oliver Chris, Hubert Burton, Zoe Boyle, Barney Fishwick, Patsy Ferran, Michael Cochrane, Lia Williams.

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‘Living’ Review: Losing His Inhibition

Bill Nighy stars as a buttoned-up bureaucrat transformed by a grim diagnosis in this drama by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, adapted from an Akira Kurosawa movie.

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By Beatrice Loayza

There is a coziness to “Living,” despite the fact that it revolves around death. It’s not a holiday movie, at least not explicitly, but like “A Christmas Carol” and other Yuletide ghost stories, it’s a film that steps back to consider the rituals and routines we perpetuate, the ways we’ve changed since the last break. And the ways we haven’t.

“Living,” directed by Oliver Hermanus from a screenplay by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, is an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s drama “Ikiru” (or “To Live”). That Japanese classic from 1952 stars the great Takashi Shimura as a drab Tokyo functionary who learns he is terminally ill and begins to question his life.

Ishiguro has called “Ikiru” a formative work for him. His books (which include “Never Let Me Go” and “The Remains of the Day”) limn the crisis of confronting one’s own life with newfound clarity, of perceiving the ways in which it is fraught and one’s complicity in its corruption. With “Living,” Ishiguro — a British writer whose parents moved the family from Nagasaki to Surrey when he was five — infuses his beloved parable with nostalgia closer to home.

“Living” transposes “Ikiru” to a gloomy postwar London filled with buttoned-up men of dignity; bowler-hat-wearing worker bees who commute in and out of the city with the solemn demeanor of churchgoers. One of them is Williams (Bill Nighy), a cadaverous bureaucrat and the intimidatingly austere head of the Public Works Department. The film opens on a new hire’s first day, but the young man’s illusions are quickly dashed when his new boss, a total gentleman at first glance, proves to be an inert leader. A group of women with a petition asking for the construction of a new playground are kicked around the building — this is under that department’s jurisdiction, no, that one — because no one wants the hassle.

Thinking of Nighy and holiday releases, Williams is the total inverse of Billy Mack, the washed-up rocker whom Nighy played in “Love Actually.” Where Mack is lovably sleazy, the creaky Williams is inhibition personified. The chipper Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood), the sole female employee of Williams’s wing, calls him “Mr. Zombie.”

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In living color.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 0 Reviews
• Kids Say 4 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Razor-sharp '90s humor has too much bite for kids.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that the humor in this groundbreaking sketch series is edgy and smart and was in many ways ahead of its time when it debuted in the early 1990s -- but today's teens (and younger children, especially) probably won't appreciate it from that perspective. They're more likely to latch on to the…

Why Age 14+?

Sketches occasionally parody recognizable products. Celebrities and materialism

Characters are sometimes shown drinking and smoking. Drugs like crack and mariju

Mild curse words like "damn" and "hell" are left in, while "ho" and "ass" are bl

Pimps and prostitutes appear in certain sketches, and jokes are rife with sexual

Incidents are rare but tend toward the outrageous. One recurring character, for

Any Positive Content?

There's at least a nod to fairness and inclusivity, in that jokes target just ab

On the plus side, the cast features a diverse roster of comedians. On the downsi

Products & Purchases

Sketches occasionally parody recognizable products. Celebrities and materialism are routinely mocked.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters are sometimes shown drinking and smoking. Drugs like crack and marijuana are mentioned occasionally for comic effect.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Mild curse words like "damn" and "hell" are left in, while "ho" and "ass" are bleeped out. Terms that deal directly with race include "honky" and "negro."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Pimps and prostitutes appear in certain sketches, and jokes are rife with sexual innuendo. Puns include the use of sexually suggestive terms like "lesbian," "transsexual," "whore," and "syphilis."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Incidents are rare but tend toward the outrageous. One recurring character, for example, likes to hit others in the head with a sock full of rocks.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

There's at least a nod to fairness and inclusivity, in that jokes target just about every social group, including homosexuals, Caucasians, African Americans, and the disabled. But truly positive messages are pretty hard to find.

Positive Role Models

On the plus side, the cast features a diverse roster of comedians. On the downside, the show's "role models" include a clown who's an ex-con, a senior citizen who does tricks with a dead dog, and a safety-obssessed fire marshall who always seems to blow things up.

Parents need to know that the humor in this groundbreaking sketch series is edgy and smart and was in many ways ahead of its time when it debuted in the early 1990s -- but today's teens (and younger children, especially) probably won't appreciate it from that perspective. They're more likely to latch on to the outrageousness of the show's characters and memorable catch phrases like "I'm gon' rock yo world," "Homey don't play that!" and "Mo' money, mo' money, mo' money!" Another downside? Kids could inadvertently add words like "honky" and "breasteses" to their budding vocabularies.

Where to Watch

Parent and kid reviews.

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• Kids say (4)

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

What's the Story?

The brainchild of actor-producer-writer-director Keenen Ivory Wayans , IN LIVING COLOR is a 30-minute sketch comedy show that ran for five seasons on the Fox network from 1990-1994 and now runs regularly in syndication (and is available on DVD). Targeting primarily African-American audiences with a cutting-edge style that was ruder and cruder than its sole competitor at the time, Saturday Night Live , the series is perhaps best known for launching the careers of actor-comedians Jim Carrey and Jamie Foxx and actress-singer Jennifer Lopez , who appeared as one of the show's "Fly Girl" dancers. In Living Color also showcased the talents of Wayans' many siblings, including Damon , Marlon , Shawn , and Kim. Skits like "Homey D. Clown," "Fire Marshall Bill," "The Homeboy Shopping Network," and "Men on Film" are just a few of the series' memorable contributions to pop culture.

Is It Any Good?

It's all really funny for grown-ups -- but the smartness of the show's humor is likely to be lost on most kids, and parents will be hard-pressed to find positive role models among the recurring characters. For example, at the end of a sketch about Jackson Five family patriarch Joe Jackson, who's hawking goods like face-whitening cream and chimpanzee clothes at Neverland Ranch while Michael is away in Europe, an announcer declares, "Joe Jackson: He beats prices just like he beats his kids." It's definitely not the kind of punchline you'd want kids repeating.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the fine line between being funny and being offensive. When it comes to making a joke, why are some stereotypes fair game while others are considered taboo? Does making light of racism and ethnic stereotypes make it easier for people to discuss their differences or merely reinforce longstanding prejudices? Would an all-black audience view this show any differently than a more general audience would? Why or why not? And how does the show compare to similar series like Saturday Night Live and MADtv ?

• Premiere date : April 15, 1990
• Cast : Damon Wayans , Jim Carrey , Keenen Ivory Wayans
• Networks : BET , Syndicated
• Genre : Variety Show
• TV rating : TV-14
• Last updated : February 28, 2022

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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In Living Color: Season 1 Reviews

In Living Color is outrageous, often hilarious, sometimes uncomfortably so.

Full Review | Feb 10, 2024

Hats off to Wayans and to the Fox network for a show with wit and style that dares to provide jolts of contemporary humor.

In Living Color is a smart, exuberant, often raunchy flip through black culture in the '90s.

The Simpsons no longer are the hottest family on the Fox Network. That honor now belongs to the Wayans family.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 9, 2024

In Living Color spoofs things that need spoofing and does it with gleeful esprit. Some may prefer their satire even meaner, but to its credit, In Living Color turns out to be in loving color, too.

Full Review | Feb 9, 2024

The sensibilities of its producer, writer and star, Keenan Ivory Wynans, are sharp and witty and perfectly in tune with contemporary culture.

Considering all the praise, I was a little disappointed But, In Living Color does have its moments.

Outrageous and exhilarating, Fox’s new In Living Color brings back wonderful memories of Saturday Night Live’s wild early days. This clever unfettered show keeps you guessing: Where will it go next?

The Keenen Ivory Wayans Laff-O-Meter is sizzling, especially with sharp parodies of everyone from Milli Vanilli to Arsenio Hall.

In Living Color will be a jolt to the staid Saturday-night broadcast-TV fare.

Remember the good old days when Saturday Night Live satirized the establishment? Before it became the establishment? In Living Color, the new Fox Broadcasting comedy, may remind you of the freshness of those thrilling days of yesteryear.

Full Review | Feb 5, 2024

Break your date. Cancel your dinner plans. At least set the VCR. Do whatever is necessary not to miss Fox's In Living Color... [It's] the fastest, funniest half-hour in a long time.

This is a topical, adventuresome comic outing that proves Fox continues to take risks nobody else will. And those risks continue to pay off.

Full Review | Feb 5, 2021

Much of the material on "In Living Color" is straightforward parody... Then, when least expected, some of the other regular characters can pull the show up short for a few passing minutes.

Full Review | Sep 11, 2018

In Living Color has its own sharp-witted yet friendly point of view and provides a showcase for more first-rate black performers than any program since The Richard Pryor Show

Full Review | Original Score: A | Sep 10, 2018

Created by Keenen Ivory Wayans, this latest child of Fox is an earthquake of laughs that give satirical sketch comedy a distinctive flavor and, yes, color.

Full Review | Sep 6, 2018

Keenen Ivory Wayans' showcase for his various siblings brought a much-needed black perspective to sketch comedy.

Fronted by a cast with more black comics than Saturday Night Live has ever had total, the show brought hip hop style, music and dancing (then still an underground thing) into middle America's homes.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 6, 2018

It's all really funny for grown-ups -- but the smartness of the show's humor is likely to be lost on most kids, and parents will be hard-pressed to find positive role models among the recurring characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 6, 2018

Like all good satire, In Living Color will upset some, if not many. When it pokes, it pokes hard, aiming right for the funny bone by way of the heart.

Full Review | Jul 3, 2018

Screen Rant

Where are they now: in living color.

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Alex Cross Author James Patterson Responds To Prime Video Series Not Adapting Specific Books

George actor is unrecognizable in georgie & mandy’s sequel set image reunion with his young sheldon kids, upton’s replacement in chicago pd season 12 has been decided: “made a lot of sense for us”.

Sketch comedy series In Living Color was staple viewing for anyone who grew up in the ‘90s. Running from 1990-1994, it catapulted the careers of comedic talents like Damon Wayans, Jamie Foxx, and Jim Carrey, and even a few professional dancers (hello, J-Lo!).

The series also served as home to some recurring characters we still quote and reference today, like Fire Marshall Bill and Homey the Clown.

With a predominantly black cast, and a heavy focus on black humour, the show crossed racial boundaries and appealed to anyone and everyone who could enjoy a good laugh. Created and written by Keenan Ivory Wayans, he also starred in the show along with many of his siblings.

RELATED: Best Sketches From SNL Season 44  

So where are they all now ? Most of the cast went on to even bigger and better things once the show ended, proving that In Living Color had one of the best comedy casts of any sketch comedy series to date.

Following his time on In Living Color , where he created some of the most memorable characters like Fire Marshall Bill (“Lemme show ya something!”) and the bikini-clad, pigtailed steroid-using female bodybuilder Vera de Milo (who had a signature horse-like laugh), Carrey’s slapstick humour translated big time to the big screen. He starred in some of the biggest comedic films of the ‘90s, including Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and its sequel, Dumb and Dumber, The Mask, Liar Liar, and The Truman Show . He also portrayed the Riddler in 1995’s Batman Forever . He continued in films through the ‘00s, starring as the Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, My, Myself & Irene , and Bruce Almighty , then took a more dramatic turn for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . His list of movie credits is about as long as his face could stretch in The Mask . He most recently reprised his role as Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber To (2014), 20 years after the original movie was released, and now stars in Showtime series Kidding . In 2020, he’ll portray Dr. Robotnik in the live action Sonic the Hedgehog film .

David Alan Grier

Best known for characters like flamboyant and effeminate “Men on Film” talk show co-host Blaine Edwards, Grier actually got his start in theatre. After In Living Color ended, he starred in a number of sitcoms, and did stand-up, after which he returned to Broadway. He also notably played the Cowardly Lion in The Wiz Live! TV movie in 2015. He’s been active on screen since, with small roles in a number of movies and series, along with a starring role on The Carmichael Show from 2015-2017, and The Cool Kids from 2018-2019. He’s currently filming a comedy called Coffee & Kareem that will also star Betty Gilpin and Taraji P. Henson. Photo: UPI.com

Tommy Davidson

Getting his start as a stand-up comedian, Davidson’s most memorable performances on In Living Color involved his spot-on impressions of Sammy Davis, Jr., Michael Jackson, and Sugar Ray Leonard. He continued his stand-up career and has had minor appearances in a number of TV series.

RELATED:  What to Expect From Saturday Night Live Season 45  

In 2015, he and his fiancée Amanda appeared on the reality series Celebrity Wife Swap , switching with Corey Feldman and his then girlfriend Courtney. His biggest role of late was in the series Black Dynamite (2011-2015). He was also in one episode of I’m Dying Up Here .

Sister to Keenan Ivory, Wayans did numerous impressions of everyone from La Toya Jackson to Oprah Winfrey and Whitney Houston on the show, as well as created memorable characters like the neighbourhouod gossip Benita Butrell and Laquita from I Love Laquita. Wayans has also appeared in movies like I’m Gonna Git You Sucka , and had recurring roles on series like A Different World ,  In the House, and My Wife and Kids , the latter of which she also served as a writer. In 2011, she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 2012 Black Reel Awards for her dramatic role in Pariah .

Shawn Wayans

His most notable roles since In Living Color include starring in the hilarious movie White Chicks alongside his brother Marlon, comic satire film Scary Movie and its sequel, and  The Wayans Bros. , which he also created. The actor, producer, writer, comedian, and DJ started off on In Living Color as the show’s DJ and later became a featured performer. According to his Twitter page, he is currently doing a stand-on comedy tour. He also has his own YouTube channel called The Boo Crew TV with his sister Kim where they post animated video shorts and other humorous content.

Marlon Wayans

The actor, comedian, screenwriter, and film producer has appeared in many film and TV series, often alongside his brother Shawn. He has shown a dramatic side as well, appearing in Requiem for a Dream . His most notable ventures have been writing, producing, and starring in the parody film Fifty Shades of Black, and creating online urban comedy destination What the Funny with Funny or Die co-founder Randy Adams.

RELATED:  Avengers & Game of Thrones Face Off On SNL Family Feud  

He had his own sitcom Marlon in 2017, and though it was eventually cancelled, it ran for two seasons, both of which are available on Netflix. He has several new projects in the works, so you’ll be seeing more of him soon. (Photo: Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal Media)

Keenan Ivory Wayans

The  eldest Wayans brother, and creator of the show, Wayans went on to play a hand in many more projects through his career, including Scary Movie , which he directed to become the highest-grossing movie ever directed by an African American ( Fantastic Four eventually took that title in 2005). He had his own talk show for one year in the late ‘90s, and most recently served as a judge for Last Comic Standing . Some of his most memorable characters on In Living Color include the Jheri-curled Frenchie and Death Row Comic from the fictional Prison Cable Access network. He was also known for impressions of celebrities like Arsenio Hall, Mike Tyson, and Steve Harvey.

If you don’t know where Foxx is now, you’ve been living under a rock for the last few decades. Enjoying arguably the biggest career of all main cast members since the series ended, the actor, singer/songwriter, record producer, and comedian won an Academy Award for playing Ray Charles in the 2004 biographical film Ray and was nominated again in 2017 for Collateral . He’s had a long career in a diverse selection of films, ranging from Django Unchained to Horrible Bosses 2 , and is a Grammy Award-winning musician. Today, he hosts the game show Beat Shazam , and has several film projects in various stages of production. He most recently appeared in the TV special Live in Front of a Studio Audience: Norman Lear’s ‘All in the Family’ and ‘The Jeffersons.’ On In Living Color , one of his best roles was the cross-eyed, ugliest woman in the world Wanda Wayne (“I’m gon’ rock yo world”).

Damon Wayans

The Head Detective (who was literally just a head); the overly articulate prison inmate Oswald Bates; the effeminate “Men On Film” co-host Antione Merriweather who loved super-tiny hats and coined phrases “two snaps up” and “hated it” with co-host Blaine (Grier); surly ex-convict clown Homey the Clown who would often bonk the kids in the head and shout “Homey Don’t Play Dat.” Wayans was the originator of all of these iconic characters, so it’s no surprise that his star rose as the show came to an end. Starring in sitcoms like My Wife and Kids (2001-2005), which he also co-created, he most recently starred as Roger Murtaugh in the TV series Lethal Weapon . He also continued to do stand-up right through to 2015.

Carrie Ann Inaba

You know her name as a judge on Dancing with the Stars and CBS daytime talk show The Talk . But did you know that Inaba was also a Fly Girl on In Living Color ? From 1990-1992, she was one of the gals gyrating and dancing to the beat during the opening and closing segments of each episode, and between commercial breaks. She also starred as Fook Yu in Austin Powers in Goldmember. She continues to judge on DWTS and was announced the official replacement of Julie Chen on The Talk at the beginning of 2019.

Jennifer Lopez

From Fly Girl to the A-list: after appearing as a dancer on the sketch comedy series from 1991 to 1993, she left to pursue an acting career. And boy, did she ever. First becoming a household name as a singer, Lopez continues to enjoy a fruitful music career with $80 million in record sales to date. But she also made it big in acting as well, first with her breakout role in the Selena biopic, then in movies like The Wedding Planner, Maid in Manhattan, and Monster-in-Law . She also starred in the small screen crime drama Shades of Blue and held a residency in Las Vegas from 2016-2018. Today, in addition to continuing with her music, with a concert tour starting June 2019, and acting – she’ll next star and executive produce a film called Hustlers that’s set to debut in September  2019 - she also serves as a judge on reality competition series World of Dance .

NEXT: Adam Sandler’s Opera Man Returns to SNL Weekend Update After 24-Year Absence  

In Living Color: Jamie Foxx & Martin Lawrence Nearly Created A Spin-Off Film

Sketch comedy show "In Living Color" ran for five seasons 30 years ago, and helped provide a launchpad for household names like Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Lopez, and Rosie Perez. Whether it was Jim Carrey performing as karate instructor Bob Jackson and Fire Marshal Bill, or Damon Wayans as a head detective and Homey D. Clown, the Emmy-winning show usually had viewers rolling on the floor laughing. It is still revered today for some of the funniest comedy skits and characters we've ever seen on television, even though today, many of the skits probably wouldn't be greenlit.

One character on "In Living Color" that was very popular when the show aired was Foxx's Wanda Wayne, described as "the ugliest woman in the world...so ugly, in fact, that no one wanted to be in the same room as her." Martin Lawrence had a similar character on "Martin" called Sheneneh Jenkins, and in 2010, the two were in talks to make a Sheneneh and Wanda film. Foxx even told HipHollywood in an interview at the time that "the Wanda/Sheneneh movie is officially written. We will officially start in the next couple of months."

Lawrence would still love to make the Sheneneh and Wanda film

The idea for a Sheneneh and Wanda film was born in 2009 when Martin Lawrence and Jamie Foxx made a fake trailer for a film called "Skank Robbery" for that year's BET Awards. Afterward, the idea of a film co-starring Halle Berry and Tyler Perry as Madea started to take shape after viewers' excitement at seeing the characters together. Along with discussing the film in interviews, Variety reported that production company Screen Gems had acquired the rights to the film, which would be produced by both stars' companies, FoxxKing and Runteldat. But for some reason, everything fell apart, and the film was scrapped.

Despite the film being shelved, talk about it just won't die, especially from the actors themselves. In an interview on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," Lawrence said he "would love to see a movie with Sheneneh." Lawrence is still holding out hope. "We were supposed to do a movie with Sheneneh and Jamie Foxx with Wanda, but that never came about," he told Fallon. "If we could ever get that together, I think y'all would love this."

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

In Living Color

The Wayans siblings present an African-American focused sketch comedy show. The Wayans siblings present an African-American focused sketch comedy show. The Wayans siblings present an African-American focused sketch comedy show.

• Keenen Ivory Wayans
• Kelly Coffield Park
• 47 User reviews
• 12 Critic reviews
• 7 wins & 26 nominations total

Episodes 127

Top cast 99+

• Self - Host …

• Self - Announcer …

• Self - DJ …

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Keenen Ivory Wayans left the show in the middle of the fourth season over disputes with Fox about censoring the show's content and rerunning early episodes without his consultation. At the end of the season, Kim Wayans and Shawn Wayans followed their brother in leaving the show. Damon Wayans had already left the show at the end of the third season to pursue his film career, and Marlon Wayans left the show after the 12th episode of the fourth season.

[repeated line]

Fire Marshall Bill : Lemme show you somethin'.

• Alternate versions When aired on B.E.T., the term "bitch" is muted when referring to a woman, but not muted when being referred to a threat on a guy.
• Connections Featured in The 42nd Annual Primetime Emmy Awards (1990)
• Soundtracks In Living Color (Theme Song) by Heavy D and The Boyz (seasons 1 and 2)

Technical specs

• Runtime 30 minutes

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‘living’: film review.

The Kazuo Ishiguro-scripted remake of Akira Kurosawa's 'Ikiru' stars Bill Nighy as a British civil servant who searches for meaning after being diagnosed with a terminal illness.

By Angie Han

Television Critic

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Remakes frequently face a double-edged sword: If a movie is beloved enough to warrant making again, there’s a decent chance it’s also beloved enough to cast a shadow so long that even a perfectly nice re-do might struggle to escape it.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres) Cast: Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp, Tom Burke Director: Oliver Hermanus Screenwriter: Kazuo Ishiguro, based on the film  Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa

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'joy', story of first test-tube baby starring bill nighy, to get world premiere at bfi london film fest, liz sargent's sundance short 'take me home' to be adapted into full-length feature film.

What finally jolts him out of his deadening routine is the imminence of actual death. Informed by his doctor that he has only six months left to live, he grasps for some way to make his limited time count — by losing himself in hedonistic pleasures with the help of a hard-drinking but generous stranger (Tom Burke), by attaching himself to an upbeat younger colleague (Aimee Lou Wood), and ultimately by finding purpose in a minor but meaningful public works project.

Nighy shrinks his typically vivid presence until even his spare frame feels too expansive for Williams’ meager personality. As Williams warms to life, Nighy projects a gentle glow rather than a roaring fire. Those around him may act a bit more assertively, but they hardly make more of an impression. His coworkers at the government office, including well-meaning newcomer Mr. Wakeling (Alex Sharp), are dwarfed by the piles of paperwork around them — purposely kept high lest “people suspect you of not having anything very important to do,” as Wood’s Miss Harris slyly notes.

The sense of repression is heightened by the film’s self-consciously old-fashioned look, which asserts itself from the opening credits — the grainy texture and elegant score mimic midcentury films so effectively that you might wonder for a moment if you’ve stepped into the wrong theater, or clicked on the wrong title. The predominating tone of Living is one of dignified restraint, in Mr. Williams’ case to the point of self-erasure. In a gut-wrenching detail, on the rare occasions that Williams works up the courage to reveal his diagnosis with someone, he still can’t help prefacing it with “It’s rather a bore, but …”

But it’s also a trick that’s been done before. While Williams spends his time haunted by his dwindling future, Living is dogged by a long past. It’s obviously distinct from Ikiru . Ishiguro has made changes to the script, including a light romantic subplot for the female lead. Hermanus’ tasteful colors and crisp lines could never be mistaken for the black-and-white messiness of Kurosawa’s. Nighy stiffens where Takashi Shimura sagged, withdraws where Shimura seemed to break himself open.

What fundamentally works about Living , though, is what worked about Ikiru , minus the surprise of discovery: the poignant premise, the unusual structure, the sardonic observations of office work and the aching compassion for a man barely in touch with his own sense of self. At the end of Living , I felt not like I’d seen an old favorite in a new light, but like I might want to go back and watch Ikiru again. There are worse outcomes for a remake than reviving affection for the original, or retelling an old story for a new audience that may not have heard it before. There are better ones, too.

Full credits

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres) Production companies: Film4, Cast: Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp, Tom Burke Director: Oliver Hermanus Screenwriter: Kazuo Ishiguro, based on the film  Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa Producers: Stephen Woolley, Elizabeth Karlsen Cinematographer: Jamie D. Ramsay Production designer: Helen Scott Costume designer: Sandy Powell Editor: Chris Wyatt Composer: Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch Casting director: Kathleen Crawford Sales: Rocket Science

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Living Communes with the Past to Honor a Kurosawa Classic

When it was properly released in the U.S. in 1960, eight years after it had opened in Japan, Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru was sometimes marketed with the image of a half-naked dancer who appeared briefly in the film – quite a bait-and-switch for a somber, nearly two-and-a-half hour drama about an elderly Japanese bureaucrat dying of cancer. That infamous marketing campaign has gone down in history as a prime example of the flamboyant dishonesty of American film distributors in the 1950s and 60s. But it was also an understandable bit of chicanery. “Come watch an old man die!” wasn’t much of a tagline then, nor is it now.

Oliver Hermanus’s new drama Living , a rather faithful British remake of Ikiru set in 1950s London, has a similar challenge; we like to think we live in more sophisticated times, but we’re probably no more likely to go see such a seemingly morbid story any more than those earlier audiences were. So, it may come as a bit of a surprise when Living starts and we are immediately jolted by…color. Maybe not technically Technicolor, but something similarly saturated and rich. The film’s shimmering images, with their deep shadows and symmetric elegance, framed carefully in a classic Academy aspect ratio, create an effect reminiscent of something from the very period in which the movie is set.   Living doesn’t try to reinvent or reimagine Ikiru so much as transport it, as if to speculate what Kurosawa’s masterpiece might have looked like had it been produced in the British film industry, in color, at around the same time.

In many of its details, the new movie, written by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, adheres closely to the original. Our hero, Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy), is a stuffed-shirt functionary who, upon learning that he’s got only a few months left to live, struggles to find meaning and joy. Then he realizes that, as a lifelong civil servant who understands the levers of power in the paralyzing bureaucracy in which he works, he can make a difference by simply helping build a modest children’s playground in a neglected corner of the city.

It would be incorrect, however, to call Hermanus and Ishiguro’s approach a replication, or imitation. The music and the cutting, or for that matter the performances, aren’t in themselves what you’d find in a ‘50s film. This is not campy cosplay, but a kind of communion with the spirit and simplicity of the past. Because there’s something ingenious about the film’s style. Living traffics in relatively basic ideas. The repression and conformity of stuffy middle-class jobs, the need to look up from a life lived within the tight parameters of society and to seize the moment – these are rudimentary, even corny themes at this point, worked over in novels and films for decades. How, then, to revitalize them for today’s audience? Well, maybe by evoking the textures of a film made in the 1950s, to help bridge the cognitive gap. A more modern approach might seem impoverished, shallow, lacking in complexity. Now, cloaked in the trappings of a film from 70 years ago, it feels like a message relayed from a hazy past to our smug present.

Like Ikiru , Living locks us into the central character’s despair. Grief and mortality transform this shadow-figure into an avatar of the human condition; we know just enough about him to let our imaginations race, and not much more. Lanky and prim, the always-excellent Nighy portrays Williams with an aristocratic reserve. We slowly learn that for him, this veneer of calm and muted confidence is an existential ambition; he’s spent his life aspiring to be a gentleman. This actually stands in marked contrast to Ikiru ’s Takashi Shimura, one of Japan’s greatest and most versatile actors, who brought to that film’s protagonist Watanabe a broad, almost theatrical anguish. Suffer in silence or rage at the snuffing of one’s light; either approach works. We all die in our own way.

Moving and engaging and visually splendid in equal measure, Living makes for a surprisingly pleasant cinematic journey, but Ikiru is a 142-minute machine designed to crush your heart into a million pieces. New Yorkers can actually see Kurosawa’s film in all its 35mm glory at the Metrograph starting next week; for everybody else, there’s Criterion or HBO Max . If you haven’t seen it yet, you really should. While its canonic status is secure, Ikiru is one Kurosawa classic that sometimes gets ignored because it’s not a crime picture or a Samurai epic. But it remains a marvelous showcase for the director’s humanity, and for his ability to strip his characters of their illusions and biases, layer by layer, until all that remains is something raw, real, and beautiful. (It should come as no surprise that the team that created this movie immediately went and made Seven Samurai .) When Watanabe, in Ikiru ’s most indelible scene, finds himself all alone one night on a swing in the playground he made possible, it feels like we’re seeing this character in full for the first time, his upright past and his sorrowful present (for he has no future) collapsing into one devastating frame, an old man singing a song from his childhood to himself in the snow.

Both Ikiru and Living are set in the years following World War II, and while the war is mentioned briefly, one does wonder how much the destructive uncertainty of those years (not to mention the global depression that preceded them) played into Williams and Watanabe’s respective desires to put their heads down and work their uneventful jobs. Monotony and constancy gain their own kind of luster when the world is going mad. Yes, Kurosawa saw a stifling, repressive complacency in the workaday bureaucrats of post-war Japan, and there are passages of Ikiru where he skewers them mightily. But he also saw their humanity, their buried striving. The highest compliment I can pay Living is that it takes those dusty ideas and makes them resonate once more. Not unlike remembering an old, familiar song, and understanding it for the first time.

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Living review: Bill Nighy delivers an almost startling transformation in this beautiful period drama

In a performance tipped for oscar attention, the british actor sheds his trademark, twinkling charisma like snakeskin, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Oliver Hermanus. Starring: Bill Nighy, Aimee Lou Wood, Alex Sharp, Tom Burke. 12A, 102 minutes.

Ikiru , in its plaintive modernity, may not be the most widely recognisable of Akira Kurosawa’s films. It can’t be slotted so neatly beside the savage violence and heroic ideals of his historical films, Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957) or Ran (1985). But the 1952 drama’s message, that a worthy legacy can be built from the tiniest and most fleeting of things, has endured. It’s encapsulated in the single image of a dying bureaucrat (played by Takashi Shimura) singing to himself as he sits on the swingset of the playground he helped build. Decades later, it’s an image that’s been reframed but barely rethought by South African director Oliver Hermanus, Nobel Prize-winning screenwriter Ishiguro Kazuo and actor Bill Nighy with Living . But, like the bureaucrat’s cherished swingset, that vague feeling of inconsequence shouldn’t make much difference. What does it matter if a film isn’t necessarily built to last? Living still has its compelling beauty.

Hermanus’s film is set in the Fifties, making it a period piece rather than a contemporary portrait as Ikiru was. It also takes place halfway around the world in London. Nighy’s bureaucrat, Mr Williams, is dying of stomach cancer. He’s spent the majority of his life in the same job at London County Hall, its monotony as constant as the piles of paperwork that pen him into his desk. It’s a necessary bit of mess, his young employee Ms Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) warns him, since without them “people suspect you of not having anything very important to do”.

Following his diagnosis, Mr Williams seeks existential comfort not from his own son, who he insists “has his own life”, but from a Brighton louche (Tom Burke) and the cheery Ms Harris. He invites the latter out to the movies and then for a drink, while confessing that he doesn’t feel able to go home (read: be alone) quite yet. She worries he’s developed a strange infatuation. But in reality, Mr Williams seems convinced that proximity to youth might be able to stave off his own mortality. “I have no special quality,” Ms Harris insists. He will have to seek meaning elsewhere.

Much of the artfulness of Living does, in part, feel borrowed from Ikiru . Here the chaotic symphony of city life is rendered not through car horns but the steady beat of commuter footsteps, surging back and forth along the same daily paths. Those towering paper stacks slice through frames, isolating its characters, who are sometimes made to look as small and crushable as ants. Hermanus ruminates on these images a little more than Kurosawa might. He already knows their power, and allows cinematographer Jamie D Ramsay to bathe them in a soft, milky light.

Crucially, we are not told of Mr Williams’s condition up front, as Ikiru does through its introductory narration. Instead, we’re introduced to him through the eyes of Mr Wakeling (Alex Sharp), a new hire at the office – specifically, in a shot of Mr Williams as seen through a train window, appropriately framed by a circle of morning frost. Nighy, too, has shed his trademark, twinkling charisma like snakeskin. What lies beneath is something almost spectral in its stillness, a man already half-dead and certainly deserving of Ms Harris’s secret nickname of “Mr Zombie”. It’s an almost startling transformation for the actor, a standout performance of an already much-lauded career. His contributions help guide Living on its muted but no less emotive journey to that singular image of a man, renewed, alone on a swingset. Hermanus is more than happy for his film to live in the shadows of Kurosawa’s. There’s still much to savour.

‘Living’ is in cinemas from 4 November

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‘Living’ Is Bill Nighy’s Finest Hour, and Worthy of Oscar Love

• By David Fear

From the moment the opening credits start rolling over an overhead view of London’s Piccadilly Square, in all of its mid-20th century glory, Oliver Hermanus’ Living whisks you into a bygone era of Britain. Or, to be more specific, a lost heyday of British cinema, when names like Powell and Pressburger were synonymous with vibrancy and verve, Ealing comedies sold a vision of postwar England that prized both stiff upper lips and smirks, and movies like Brief Encounter pitted emotional repression against raging passion. The vintage font, the slightly washed tint of the color, the old-school score by the London contemporary orchestra — there are few moments where you wonder if this movie might have been recently discovered gathering dust in a vault, some lost masterpiece that even predates its source material.

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And it’s the star himself who, even more than the decor and the change of cultural scenery, lifts Living out of the realm of a remake and into something far more profound. It becomes another story of a man at long last learning how to embrace the world, yet one that is completely substantial and shattering and, yeah, even life-affirming on its own. The performance lifts it above and beyond. By the time the movie pays homage by replicating Ikiru ’s most famous shot of an old man on a swing, totally alive for the first time, Nighy makes you feel like the nod is earned. It’s a testament to the power of one “small” man, doing one “small” thing that will benefit those he leaves behind. And, even more strikingly, to the talent of one giant actor, turning something dialed down to less into something so very much more.

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