Requiem for the New Left ("It was over as soon as the war ended"), played rather detachedly by Old Lefty Sidney Lumet. A couple of Vietnam protesters have been on the lam, with their two sons, since bombing a napalm plant in the early Seventies; their elder son impresses the music teacher at his new school, enough so to be channeled toward Juilliard; the music teacher has a daughter just the son's age; a crisis begins to brew. (The boy's father, a rock-and-roll man, regards classical stuff as "decadent, white-skinned, privileged crap.") The thing never rings terribly true -- the music any more than the politics, the teen romance a little more than either. But it sometimes rings pretty reasonable: the anonymous and unphotogenic neighborhoods and hideouts (no telltale Che Guevara poster on the bedroom wall, no peace sign taped to the fridge, no Grateful Dead album propped up anywhere); and the individual "niceness" and family togetherness maintained so as not to attract outsiders' attention. Written by Naomi Foner; with River Phoenix, Christine Lahti, Judd Hirsch, and Martha Plimpton. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.