The fact that lower Manhattan’s Chinatown and Little Italy are adjacent to one another provides the basis for this 1987 exploitation bloodbath directed by Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant), which has racial gang fights and old-boy networks to spare. Bojan Bazelli’s location photography is luminous and exciting, and the battle lines charted in Nicholas St. John’s script are fairly complex, but the characterizations in this Romeo and Juliet tale of an Italian-American (Richard Panebianco) and a Chinese-American (Sari Chang) caught in the cross fire are so minimal that it’s hard to get very involved in the proceedings. (The fact that St. John occasionally filches dialogue from West Side Story doesn’t help much either.) James Russo, David Caruso, Russell Wong, Joey Chin, and the Living Theatre’s Judith Malina also figure in the cast. (JR) Read more
This first feature by Polish stage director Yurek Bogayevicz stars Sally Kirkland and Paulina Porizkova, who play an emigre movie star down on her luck in New York and the idolizing refugee she takes in. The screenplay is by Andrzej Wajda associate Agnieszka Holland, from a story by her and Bogayevicz. A curious blend of the plot of All About Evewith an emphasis on the humiliations of acting and middle age that is appreciably more blunt than the originaland an account of the political and cultural alienation of Czech emigres, the film lives mainly through its performances: Kirkland is especially powerful as the eponymous lead, offering conceivably the most remarkable impersonation of an eastern European by an American on record. Although the film climaxes in some rather forced melodrama, the eastern European perspective on the New York theater world has much of the satirical sharpness that only an outsider’s viewpoint can bring to it. With Robert Fields, Ruth Maleczech, and Stefan Schnabel. (JR) Read more
