The power of this melodramatic film comes from the rugged, documentary look it brings to its subject: the impoverished life in Brooklyn's Red Hook housing projects. An African-American teenager (the intense newcomer, Lawrence Gilliard) sees a way out in a dangerous robbery of drug money which he thinks should be enough to send his working-class family into the mainstream of the American dream. In spite of its share of expository dialogue and conventional plotting, the film maintains a gripping immediacy that television and slick films like New Jack City and Juice fail to capture. In its best moments there is an unsparing honesty in the material and the young director Matty Rich's respect for Method acting (some of the scenes are drawn out as in a Cassavetes film) shows that he is more interested in psychology than posturing. It's a docudrama in that the documentary aspect is so dramatic it overpowers the melodrama. What we remember are not the heavy speeches but the pictures that speak for themselves: the actors' faces and the startling images of a brutal urban environment. -Tom Kemper