‘The Fabulous Filipino Brothers’ Review: A Culturally Specific Comedy With Universal Appeal

Director-star Dante Basco’s family affair is an engagingly freeform portmanteau that runs the gamut from joltingly dark to sweetly romantic.

The title for “The Fabulous Filipino Brothers” makes it sound like a movie about a now-obscure troupe of singing-dancing siblings who once opened for Frank Sinatra in Las Vegas, and were audience favorites back in the day on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” As it turns out, however, this engagingly freeform comedy has an entirely different sort of showbiz pedigree, being the joint effort of four real-life Filipino-American brothers — Dante, Derek, Dionysio and Darion Basco — with scads of film and TV acting, writing and producing credits on their respective IMDb pages. And while one can only wonder just how autobiographical this enterprise may be for any of them, there can be no doubt that their family ties are a major reason why the interactions of the characters they portray resound with a solid ring of truth that greatly enhances all the funny business.