La Ciudad (The City)

This is certainly not a movie for the Ahnold, Rambo, blast 'em out of the galaxy crowd. It is, rather, a spare, black and white, mise en scene depiction of Hispanic immigrants in New York City. There are four different stories, the first three ending in a somewhat frustrating, unresolved manner. The fourth story lifts the film up tremendously with a subtle, but very powerful scene that involves no dialogue or music at all. This is the type of film that is not overly exciting, but will stay with you for quite a while and has many layers of meaning that all come together at the end.

David Riker's neo-realist drama "The City" looks at the plight of Latin American immigrants in New York. Filmed in black and white, starring a mostly unknown cast, and spoken mostly in Spanish, this movie tests your attention span but makes perfectly clear how much these people struggling to survive. The only other movie that I know that draws this much attention to the immigrants' plight is Herbert Biberman's "Salt of the Earth", which Biberman made while blacklisted.

If you don't feel something for the characters, then you have no soul. As the Latin American population in the United States continues to grow, movies like this will become all the more important. Highly recommended.

La Ciudad is a wonderful, and beautiful movie with twisting story lines. Its black and white imagery gives us a feeling of being there; the vacant lot along the East River waterfront, the empty lot in Bushwick, the streets of Mott Haven, the sweatshops. I will say that my opinion of the movie is slightly tainted. I got to view it at New York's Museum of the Moving Image and met the director afterwards to talk about the film's unique production. Filmed over years, using black and white film was actually a necessity in order to create consistancy in lighting. The stories that make up the film's parts were developed by the actors shown in the film; which may explain its lack of any Hollywood-type ending. This is a good film to watch.

I thought I had seen terrible movies in my life, but this one takes the cake... It's by far the worse movie ever made and I have no idea how it won the awards that it did... Save yourselves the time and agony and watch something else, anything else...

This film was very beautiful and quite moving. While watching it, I noticed how wonderfully the cinematographer (Harlan Bosmajian) had captured the light throughout the four vignettes of the film. He created an intimacy between he characters and the viewer that many attempt to do these days but just spoil by giving the viewer too much "eye candy." The director, David Riker has done such a good job with this film, I highly recommend it and urge everyone to see it as soon as possible. Riker not only shows us how many immigrants live and work in this country, but he shows it in a way that we can all relate to it. I thought of my parents and wondered how their own immigration process was. Visually, emotionally, and intellectually, this is definitely a film to experience. Go see it!