Straight Out Of Brooklyn

While STRAIGHT OUT OF BROOKLYN scrupulously avoids the glamorous violence that so often passes for black life in the movies, novice director Matty Rich hasn't replaced it with anything substantial.

Dennis Brown (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr.) was raised in a brutal housing project in Brooklyn. His parents, Ray (George T. Odom) and Frankie (Ann D. Sanders), have done their best to provide their children with a stable home and a sense of pride in themselves and their heritage as black Americans, but social pressures conspire to defeat them. Embittered and convinced that he's been kept down by a white conspiracy to destroy black men, Ray drinks and beats his long-sufferi...