Hurricane Streets
The film tells the story of Marcus, a New York City street teenager who is conflicted between running with a gang who want to move up in more serious crimes and a girl he meets who tries to steer him clear from a potential life in prison.Marcus invites Melena to his fifteenth birthday party, but she declines because her father Paco, an abusive tow truck driver, doesn't approve of her staying out late.Marcus tells Melena about his plans to move to New Mexico and asks her to join him, but she turns it down because she knows her father would never approve and she is not able to afford the ticket.When Marcus is hauled to the police station for continuing to sell stolen goods, he learns from a detective named Hank that his mother is actually in prison for murder, not smuggling undocumented immigrants like she had told him.[3] Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle gave the film 4 and a half stars out of 5, commenting "If Truffaut had set The 400 Blows in the mean streets of New York's Lower East Side, it might have ended up looking something like this.Freeman's noirish tale of edgy inner-city youth and the problematic stepping stones a young man encounters in his effort to do the right thing is a genuinely affecting piece of NYC realism; it's a cinema vérité take on a Bowery childhood."[4][5] Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote the film "is a wildly uneven drama of aimless street youth roaming through Manhattan's Lower East Side.When it hits the bull's-eye, it reminds you of how most adolescents are at the mercy of their environments and dependent on whatever peer groups are available for a tenuous sense of identity.[6] Though he critiqued the film’s use of melodrama, he commended Sexton’s performance, saying he "embodies adolescent vulnerability and defiance with a scary naturalness".