I grew up in Brooklyn. I knew Spike and his friends. Their names and faces were different, but their lives were the same. If you treat this movie as a political statement you will be offended. If you treat this movie as entertainment you'll suffer. But if you treat this movie as a sociological exercise, you will be enlightened. No movie made before or since, has captured the essence of Brooklyn so effectively. Story, plot progression, and emotive content are deliberately sacrificed to the end of painting a realistic portrait of both the subjects and their neighborhood. At the film's conclusion, the characters, like their environs, develop little. Such is Brooklyn.
Review of Spike of Bensonhurst
