Weekend Movie Forecast: Harry Potter or 500 Days of Summer

Off Jackson Avenue, set in the pre-gentrification days of Long Island City, is an interwoven crime story involving a Mexican woman tricked into sex-slavery by an Albanian pimp, a Japanese hit man haunted by his recently-dead mother's ghost, and a local car thief (writer/director John-Luke Montias) on one last spree to raise enough money to buy a tire store and go legit. Andrew Schenker at Slant calls it "an engagingly lurid but ultimately tepid crime drama. A stern rebuke (as if we needed another) to anyone's antiquated notions of the American dream, the film stacks the deck mercilessly against at least two-thirds of its principal characters, even as it wisely suggests new possibilities at the end for all three. But between the largely amateurish acting and the occasional clumsiness of the plotting, Montias has little of interest to suggest about the difficulties of making a go at life in 21st-century New York, except that it's difficult to succeed, especially if you're an immigrant, and that—P.S. 1, Dutch Kills, and Tournesol notwithstanding—you're really better off giving a wide berth to Long Island City altogether."