The Narrows -- Film Review

Hollywood Reporter, 6.29.09
By Sheri Linden

Working-class boy with artistic aspirations is caught between the Brooklyn mob and Manhattan dreams in this been-there, done-that drama. Director Francois A. Velle pays admirable attention to setting and detail, yet little feels fresh or fully alive in "The Narrows," which recently bowed in New York and Los Angeles.

With echoes of "Saturday Night Fever," "Fingers" and "Mean Streets," as well as countless other crime sagas, the indie film finds Mike Manadoro (Kevin Zegers) at a crossroads. His widowed father (Vincent D'Onofrio), a former sanitation worker living on disability and his earnings as a bookie, is too proud to let Mike accept a university scholarship. So when Bay Ridge kingpin Tony (Titus Welliver) offers Mike a high-paying courier job, he sees a solution to his tuition woes.

...Zegers, who was terrific in "Transamerica," has charisma as Mike but is not entirely convincing as brooding artist or tough guy. Most of the performances are by the well-worn numbers, with two exceptions. Tony's icy menace has the weight of hard-won authority in Welliver's hands. And D'Onofrio's Vinny, by far the film's most complex and compelling character, suggests a far more interesting story than the one that unfolds onscreen.
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Thanks Linda!
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24/Seven:Brooklyn, 7.1.09

Brooklyn author's 'Heart' is in 'The Narrows'

By Meredith Deliso

As a kid, the first movie Tim McLoughlin ever saw was at the Pavilion 8 (which some of you may remember as the old Sanders). It was 1964, the film was “The Incredible Mr. Limpet,” starring Don Knotts.

“That place was a cathedral,” remembers McLoughlin, a Brooklyn native who grew up in Bensonhurst and now, after stints in several Brooklyn neighborhoods, currently resides in Brooklyn Heights (read an essay of his about the theater here).

Today, when the author goes to the Park Slope theater, his own movie is on the screen: “The Narrows,” based on his 2001 book “Heart of the Old Country,” published by Brooklyn-based publisher Akashic Books.

How “Heart” came to be published itself is the stuff worthy of cinema. A Brooklyn court clerk, McLoughlin knew he had a story in him, and in his late 30s, started writing a coming-of-age story about a 19 year old, Mike, going to school part time and working for Big Lou’s Car Service, on the periphery of organized crime in Bay Ridge.

....The biggest name attached to the film has to be D’Onofrio’s, who plays Mike’s father with a savviness yet also a sadness that impressed McLoughlin.
“He told me later that he based his physical mannerisms and some of his patterns of speech on an old relative of his who was from Bensonhurst,” says the author. “It worked really well.”
Full article

Thanks Linda!