Manthast Absolutely amazing

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Teddie Blake The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

johndunbar-580-920543 Of all the many merits of this film mentioned by various reviewers it seems that the 'mood' of the cinematography doesn't get mentioned. Perhaps the most powerful of these elements are the cars; drop dead gorgeous American beauties of the age that perfectly reflect the warm mood of celebration of life that pervades the rest of the era. For all their social and individual problems, the protagonists all get to cruise around in these incredible automobiles. The Cadillac takes centre stage but the movie abounds with reverential shots of great cars like Pontiac Catalinas, Kaiser, Oldsmobiles etc. focusing the photography and sound on their most seductive features like 'rocket' hood ornaments and almost unreally beautiful colors. The Director caught America of the 1950s 'dead on' when he makes frequent mention of their seductive influence on the generation.

btm1 LIBERTY HEIGHTS is a movie set in the mid 1950s. That was the post-war period of major and rapid transitions. Television (in its black and white "golden years") was replacing radio as the medium for soaps, dramas and comedies. Most movie theaters started featuring air conditioning as a major attraction, and room air conditioners were just beginning to pop up in windows throughout the America. After the war years, when all of manufacturing had been limited to the war effort, many new products and materials were available to consumers, including 45 and LP records and hi-fi stereo sets, home freezers and frozen food, plastics, and non-stop transcontinental air traffic. Levittown had just begun the era of planned communities and high-rise apartment building "projects" were being built in an effort to provide low rent urban housing. Popular singers such as Perry Como and Patti Page were being replaced by Elvis Presley and rock and roll music by black singers such as Bill Haley and then James Brown.It was the era in which the Supreme Court ruled on Brown vs Board of Education and Pres. Eisenhower sent troops to Arkansas to enforce school desegregation.This was really a pretty short era. The era ended with the social revolutions of the 1960s, after a new generation of Black intellectuals decided Dr. Martin Luther King's passive resistance approach was either not working or working too slowly, and was supplanted by Black Power militancy. The riots after Martin Luther King's assassination escalated the "white flight" and most urban Jewish communities are now either black or Hispanic communities.LIBERTY HEIGHTS follows coming of age stories of two brothers from a middle class Jewish community in Baltimore. One brother becomes involved with a rich girl and her boyfriend from a wealthy upper class WASP neighborhood; his brother with a black girl being bused into his high school. She is the daughter of a well-to-do upper middle class black family. At that time the people in these communities knew almost nothing about the people in the neighboring communities, with racial stereotypes and rumor substituting for truth and facts. A sign on a community swimming pool reads "No Jews, Dogs or Negroes allowed." The movie also follows the boys' father, who runs a burlesque theater as a front to launder the money he makes from the illegal numbers racket in the parts of Baltimore not controlled by Italian Mafia or by black criminals.Barry Levinson masterly wrote and directed LIBERTY HEIGHTS, using this Baltimore family's stories to show us a part of urban America and its race relations that no longer exist.The sound track is full of wonderful songs from the era that are now classics.

Dorian Tenore-Bartilucci (dtb) LIBERTY HEIGHTS (LH) is a fine addition to writer/director Barry Levinson's series of nostalgic autobiographical Baltimore-set films. This episodic but heartfelt comedy-drama, set in the mid-1950s, stars Adrien Brody and Ben Foster as brothers Van and Ben Kurtzman, who come of age while grappling with anti-Semitism, their loving dad's (Joe Mantegna) shady business dealings (he runs both a burlesque house and a low-profile numbers racket. My late dad, a bookie, would've loved this guy! :-), racism (Ben and his pretty black classmate Sylvia, appealingly played by Rebekah Johnson, start seeing each other on the sly), and classism (Van falls hard for blonde WASP dream girl Dubbie, who turns out to be a nightmare -- a tragic figure, in fact -- but is capably played by supermodel Carolyn Murphy in her first and, to date, only film role that I know of). While LH isn't quite as sharp and knowing as Levinson's modern classic DINER (with which LH would make an interesting double feature; the DVD includes the DINER trailer, by the way), it's rendered with great affection and attention to detail about the characters, their world, and the changing times they're living in. For me, the wittier moments really made the film -- Ben's anarchic streak livens things up, to say the least! Best Ben moments: 1) his scandalizing his family by dressing as Hitler on Halloween; 2) the act of defiance he and his friends eventually pull at the "NO JEWS..." pool; and 3) the tender yet chaste kiss he gives Sylvia at graduation, freaking out both sets of parents. LH is worth a rental, at the very least!

SamRag From time to time one comes across remarkable films like Liberty Heights where simple story is told in extraordinary manner. This film is about the Jewish Kurtzman family, but we follow the father and his two sons as three separate stories. Each one of them having their own struggle and challenges to face. What struck me as the most amazing part of the story was the easiness of it, how it flowed and gently tackled serious issues in the community of that time. It portrait itself in a realistic manner, where there were no real baddies or large showdown, just people going through life. The performance of the actors was brilliant, with Joe Mantegna (the father), showing once more what a talent he is. This film won't leave anyone untouched. 8/10