Crooklyn

This semi-comic look at middle-class family life in Brooklyn, New York, in the mid-'70s was written by Spike Lee and his siblings Joie and Cinqué. As well as hanging out on the stoop and battling with four idle brothers, ten-year-old Troy (Harris) - from whose point of view the story is told - witnesses the tensions between her mother (Woodard) and father (Lindo). While Lee's customary visual style and sense of street vitality are much in evidence, it's easy to see why this fond, semi-autobiographical evocation of a largely vanished lifestyle bombed in the US. It's not just the misjudgment of depicting Troy's lengthy visit to an aunt in Virginia through the squeezed perspective of an anamorphic lens, nor even the final scenes in which the story lurches from comedy to half-hearted melodrama: the key problem is that the film is simply a ragged series of anecdotal sketches.