Metrograph

Brazilian diva Marília Pêra, fresh from her international breakthrough in Héctor Babenco’s Pixote, is the queenly matriarch of a dope-dealing dynasty in Morrissey’s marvelous, grimly funny Alphabet City melodrama, concerning a turf war between rival drug-slinging families in a bombed-out Loisaida, escalating from tough talk to gunplay in the hallowed aisles of the Menudo store. Crooked cops, shooting galleries, an East Village that looks as uninhabitable as the surface of the moon, and Richard Ulacia, as Pêra’s hulking lunkhead son, giving a positively Frankensteinian performance… This bad boy’s got it all!

35mm print courtesy of Peter Conheim/Cinema Preservation Alliance

Distributor: Vinegar Syndrome