67%User score 67 percent
True Stories
1986 · Comedy · Music
User Score
410 votes
THE STORY OF AN ORDINARY MAN IN AN EXTRAORDINARY PLACE.
An American oil company sends a man to Scotland to buy up an entire village where they want to build a refinery. But things don't go as expected.
Recommendations based on this film
CinemaSerf
June 8, 2023
Burt Lancaster is the multi-millionaire oil magnate "Felix Happer" who despatches one of his minions (Peter Riegert) to Scotland to buy up a village to turn it into an oil refinery. Once he arrives, he is taken for a bit of a ride by the canny locals as they try to milk him for as much cash as they can. In the days before cell phones; he has to call his boss from the phone box reporting his lack of progress and some…
Read the full review on TMDB
Filipe Manuel Neto
June 20, 2023
**Slow, with boring characters and dialogues and a disjointed script, this film does not justify the “hype” around it.** This is one of those indie films that has won over a legion of self-confessed admirers. It's a film that everyone speaks highly of, as if it were a solid masterpiece. I didn't know that when I saw it for the first time, so I saw it without a lot of expectations. I'm glad I did it: despite recognizi…
Read the full review on TMDBbadelf
February 5, 2026
Bill Forsyth's Local Hero sends an American oil company executive (Peter Riegert) to a remote Scottish coastal village to buy it up for a refinery. What he finds instead is a community that can't quite be bought, locals who negotiate on their own eccentric terms, and a way of life that makes his corporate ambitions seem hollow and absurd. This is gentle, quirky, humanistic filmmaking at its finest. There's no heavy-h…
Read the full review on TMDBReviews are written by the TMDB community, not by Local Hero's publisher.
