Chop Shop

Arguably a little more conventional than Bahrani’s Man Push Cart, this centres on 12-year-old Alejandro, helping out and making his bed at an auto body-shop in a run-down New York neighbourhood, and his older sister, joining him from a foster home and also trying to make enough money to buy a truck the kid’s set his street-smart heart on. The neorealist tendencies extend even to faint echoes of ‘Bicycle Thieves’, but Bahrani’s  warier of melodrama than De Sica; though the film does divide into three half-hour acts, the focus on character, mood and texture rather than plot make for great credibility in the treatment of kids at the exploitative mercy of adults. Touching, funny, sad and beautifully observed.