City of Hope

Director: John Sayles

1991 / 129min / DCP

Set in an unnamed mid-sized American city whose rampant graft and corruption suggest any number of real-life models, Sayles’s galvanizing drama stars Tony Lo Bianco as a building contractor who faces increasing pressure from the police, city hall, and his own estranged son (Vincent Spano) to put the torch to an apartment block that he owns, so to make way for a commercial development guaranteed to produce hefty kickback payments for the local power brokers. “A powerful film, and an angry one. It is impossible not to find echoes of its despair on the front pages every day.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times