Robert De Niro's directing debut -- a chance to dedicate a movie to the memory of his father, and immediately afterwards to give written thanks to songwriter Sammy Cahn. What else? To select golden oldies for a coming-of-age story set in the Sixties; to let a first-person narrator lay the foundation stones and fill in the gaps ("It was great to be Catholic and go to confession. You could start over every week"); to trot out slow-motion for the peaks of violence and romance. The action spans eight years, or rather leaps eight years, from one young actor (Francis Capra) to another (Lillo Brancato), chronicling the struggle for a boy's soul between his decent, hard-working, bus-driving father (De Niro) and the neighborhood hood (Chazz Palminteri, who adapted the screenplay from his original stage version). Much of the material, old-hat though it is, is clearly close to De Niro's heart, but that doesn't save the interracial romance, for example, from baldness and awkwardness (narrator: "She was tall, she was beautiful, she was classy. But she was black"). There are numerous nice moments and performances, but the broader impression is of unsteadiness of tone and mood, unevenness of quality. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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