El Ciudad (The City)

Now pushing its sixth decade, neo-realism isn't so neo any more. Five years in the making, David Riker's debut feature, El Ciudad (The City), injects the old tradition with new passion, irony, mythic resonance, and contemporary urgency. This poignant quartet of black-and-white snapshots (the linking device of the flashing camera in a passport-photo shop might be ill-considered) of Latin American immigrant life on the fringes of New York City evokes outrage but also lapses occasionally into sentiment and preachiness. The first story about a truckload of unemployed workers dumped on a rubble-strewn island to clean bricks is a Sisyphean fable flawed by a bathetic ending; the last one, about a woman who creates a silent solidarity when she beseeches her sweatshop boss to pay her and save her ailing daughter's life, complements and partly redeems the first. A tale of a homeless puppeteer and his daughter ends on a note of pathos but the implications of its central motif -- who's pulling the puppeteer's strings if not the filmmaker? -- are not pursued. Most haunting is the tale of a Mexican teenager who meets the love of his life his first night in the big city -- drawing on the myths of the labyrinth and Orpheus, El Ciudad here transcends neo-realism for another reality altogether. At the Museum of Fine Arts.

-- Peter Keough