Foreign Parts

Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki’s documentary covers a lot of the same ground (literally) as Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop—the junkyards and spare-parts vendors of the Willets Point area of Queens—but this film opts for a bigger class struggle between midtown fat cats and the outer-borough denizens that call this desolation row home. The longer you watch these locals stumble and hustle, the more you mourn this broken-down neighborhood’s inevitable demise.