A Guide to Recognising Your Saints (Dito Montiel, 2006)

You can't knock this semi-autobiographical piece on the director's own youth in a Queens ghetto for lack of sincerity, and it's well acted too, with even the inexplicably popular Shia LaBeouf as the young protagonist not proving a hindrance for once.
But 'telling it like it is' can only get you so far. The young Montiel's gormless friends and self-deluding family are even more inarticulate than he is, and unlike in the well-worn genre's better specimens such as Boyz n the Hood there are no moments of catharsis or rough poetry to latch on to. Some die, some go to jail, and the central character does a runner and then mulls over whatever it meant to him years later, now in the form of the underused Robert Downey Jr. It's not a bad film, just of little original interest to a wider world.

5/10