–The Man Who Fell to Earth is this weekend’s pick. Every Saturday or Sunday, Celluloid Dimension selects a film to spotlight for your weekend viewing. We like to champion underrated gems and forgotten titles that deserve a wider audience. Dive in and enjoy the ride. –
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
Written by Paul Mayersberg
Starring:
- David Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton
- Rip Torn as Nathan Bryce
- Candy Clark as Mary-Lou
- Buck Henry as Oliver Farnsworth
- Bernie Casey as Peters
- Jackson D. Kane as Professor Canutti
- Rick Riccardo as Trevor
Rating: 
An overwhelming head-trip of eco-warning, capitalist burnout, and cosmic doom, The Man Who Fell to Earth plays less like a story than a drifting sci-fi hallucination. Nicolas Roeg stacks image upon image until the film barely acknowledges a beginning, middle, or end, unfolding instead as a restless mosaic of moods and ideas. As a half-theological, half-existential meditation on humanity’s place in the universe, it doesn’t always click, but the sheer nerve of its intellectual ambition gives the whole thing a strange gravity. David Bowie wanders through the film as an alien visitor who lands on Earth looking to save his drought-stricken planet, only to get tangled in the seductive rot of human civilization. Roeg’s editing ricochets between serene landscapes and jumpy, fragmented montage, mirroring the alien’s growing disorientation. Dense, strange, and sometimes maddeningly opaque, yet its melancholic sci-fi poetry makes the trip worth taking.
