Reviews of ALPHABET CITY

"Too pretty to be real and too real to be pretty," sniffed the New York Times when Amos Poe's first serious brush with mainstream cinema opened at the Orpheum; in retrospect, what was meant as a dismissal is actually a strong recommendation for those in the know. Vincent Spano (then fresh from his terrific performance in John Sayles' Baby, It's You) stars as Johnny in this noir-drenched drama about an organized crime underling who balks at torching his family tenement and thus earns the wrath of the mob. Unabashedly stylized and mercurially melodramatic, Alphabet City is—in the truest sense of the phrase—a film that got away.

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