A Guide To Recognising Your Saints - DVD Review

For those who find today’s post-Giuliani New York too squeaky, novelist-turned-director Dito Montiel’s cine-memoir of his youth in Queens is a welcome strut through the city’s sultry, graffitied past. Exhuming Astoria circa ’86 in humid detail, it spins around knockout turns from Shia LaBeouf as teen Dito and Channing Tatum as his off-the-rails mate Antonio. True, you have to swallow a few rites-of-passage cliches, but the flashbacks roil with a sweat-soaked authenticity that conjures fair comparison with the likes of Mean Streets, Kids and, especially, Do The Right Thing – hardly surprising given the setting is only one borough and three years away from Lee’s classic. Alternative and deleted scenes and a decent-if-short Making Of are among the add-ons, capped off with a heartfelt commentary that finds Montiel humbly chuffed that he got the movie made.