Brooklyn Bound

This movie is overall a decent film. No big names, I only happened upon it cause Dean Winters is in it. The films main focus is on Sean, who is a drug dealer who sells drugs to take care of his mother and brother. The story doesn't focus a lot on plot, more on the lives of Sean and the people who are close to him, like his brother(whose trying to get involved in his brother's work), and Sean's best friend Rob (who owes money to gangster Dean Winters). The story has good character development, a few good fights, and a nice atmosphere. The problem comes in at the end. I won't go into specifics at the risk of ruining the film, but there were too many questions that needed answering. I still give this movie a solid 6/10, but it could have been a 7/10 if not for the ending.

This is a great independent film. As a novice on independent filmmaking it is quite inspiring to see the talent of the entire cast & crew with such a low budget to work with. The film has managed to capture the true street environment and was largely filmed in East New York, which takes quite a bit of balls. It allows the viewer to experience scenes in some of Brooklyn's roughest housing projects, and has the gritty everyday drama for survival mentality. The acting is top notch, and the storyline is realistic due to it's simplicity; this is just a great overall film. I would compare this movie to another excellent yet underrated film called New Jersey Drive. My rating 8 out of 10.

I thought the story was good but the direction was excellent. The director knew how to keep you interested in the story from beginning to middle to end. I like that the story showed the two brothers, one being the hero and the other being the "problem child". However, it takes a while before you remember that they are both from the same stock with the same bad ways.I'm sure he didn't have a big budget, regardless the movie seemed to be very professional. I feel that the story was a little to real, which would probably explain why it wasn't as popular as I thought it should be. There were a lot of drug scenes. I'm anxious to see what he comes out with next.

You won't see many movies teaming with this much humanity, much less one that spends most of its time in the housing projects of East New York, Brooklyn. Filmmaker Rich Devaney isn't condescending or sentimental but even the most minor characters in his film are fleshed into real human beings. That's Devaney's first achievement in this movie. The second is that he tells the story of a conflicted criminal trafficking in some mean streets and he does it without ripping off Scorsese for one second. Devaney gets great performances from his cast, he tells a powerful story without showing off the superb technique he clearly has and he gives you memorable images without a huge art department framing them and lighting them and stuffing them into your skull. Brooklyn Bound is evidence of that rarest quality in a filmmaker- talent to spare, minus the ego. And the movie shines brighter for it.

Brooklyn Bound is an excellent movie. One should not mistake its decidedly unflashy tone for any shortcoming in technique. Its writer/director Rich Devaney knows what he is doing. No knock on The Man but it is incredibly refreshing to see a movie about a conflicted criminal that doesn't rip off Scorsese. Shot in East New York projects, pre-hipster Williamsburg dive bars, tenements and one luxury high rise that seems just as squalid, Brooklyn Bound teams with life own, full of vivid, human characters, humor and menace. You don't have to be a fan of Fresh or Superfly (though both are good movies) to enjoy this movie. It's real, it's compelling and I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

I'm a movie snob. And I'm really looking forward to whatever Mr. Devaney does next. He really knows how to tell a story with a camera. He gets great performances out of his mostly non-actor cast and he doesn't coopt one frame of his story to show of any of the superb filmmaking technique that he surely possesses. The events of the movie are tinged with a senselessness in the best sense, a film with a big heart that gets broken.