So You Wanna Know Ol' Brooklyn?

15 films that will help you understand the "old country"

For the past several weeks, I’ve waxed on about the wonders of my hometown, a place I like to call Old Brooklyn. As I’ve mentioned, it’s more than a location, it’s a way of being, and while I think I’m a decently capable writer, there’s nothing like going to a place to really get a feel for it.

Of course, the challenge with Old Brooklyn is that it’s not only largely lost in time, but that even when it does still physically exist, it’s also hard to find if you don’t know where to look. And of course, Brooklyn—especially Old Brooklyn—is a multitude of experiences. Yes, there’s definitely a through line of attitude, of expressions, of ways of seeing the world. But there’s no one way to live or be or act or even talk. While I’ve got a decent way with words, mine is just one woman’s take.

So, in the spirit of the season—the season being “Off From Work, Hiding from Covid, Watching a Lot of TV”—I have compiled a list of 15 films that will help you better understand what I mean when I talk about Brooklyn. Ten are pure Brooklyn cinema, and five are documentaries.

1. Do the Right Thing: This Spike Lee film tops the list because, while no one film can be all of Brooklyn, this one comes pretty close. It’s got the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. That it stands the test of time is as much a testament to the ills of our city as it is to the wonder of this film.
2. Los Sures: This 1984 documentary about a former Puerto Rican enclave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, shows the diverse perspectives of one community—all of whose members consider Los Sures home, despite its flaws. It’s a window into a Nuyorican Brooklyn that has been all but wiped out by gentrification.
3. Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.: Leslie Harris’s 1992 film—the title of which harkens back to when we used to refer to trains not by their number, but by their management-company line—starts on the Park Place stop on the 2/3 train. It’s a slice of life  capturing the tensions and stresses facing teenage Black girls, including the pain of stereotypes, the challenges of the education system, relationships, familial responsibilities, sexuality, and pregnancy. It opens with the line, “I’m a Brooklyn girl. Lots of folks think Brooklyn girls are real tough. I guess that’s true.” While the Brooklyn in the backdrop is much changed, the protagonist’s journey and the filmmaking itself are as fresh as ever.
4. The Squid and the Whale: If Old Brooklyn had a gentrified, intellectual class, they most certainly lived in Park Slope. More than a neighborhood, Park Slope was a lifestyle. No film captures this intellectual, middle-class way of life better than Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical film, where parents are recognized at teacher conferences for New Yorker stories that they have written and fight over whose turn it is to pay for the tennis lessons that the kids schlep to in the Prospect Park bubble. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, lined with books the family has collected, distract from the peeling paint around the house. This beautiful family story about divorce is a pitch-perfect ode to the goings-on behind the closed-brownstone doors of families that I knew as a kid.
5. Video Music Box: Even if your family owned a ton of books, there was a high probability that, in Old Brooklyn, they didn’t have cable. Hardly anybody did. So when the MTV craze was reshaping American culture, kids in Brooklyn turned to a public-access channel for a show called Video Music Box. This documentary is the behind-the-scenes story of the man responsible for the epic, 20-plus-year run of a show that shaped music and nightlife not just in Brooklyn, but through all of New York.
6. 25th Hour: Many people have tried (and often failed) to capture what New York was like in the wake of 9/11. I don’t know that anyone has nailed it as perfectly as Spike Lee does in this movie, in which Ed Norton plays Monty Brogan, a well-educated drug dealer deciding how to spend his last day before heading off to do a long bid in jail. The end of his road—a night of good times, reckonings, and bittersweet farewells—parallels the New York that ended when the towers fell—to say nothing of the very real way this film examines the double-edged sword of long-standing friendships, the stuff Old Brooklyn is made from.
7. Moonstruck: Yes, this is a love letter to Italian Americans, but it’s also a love letter to an Old Brooklyn way of life. One where you worked local, shopped local, ate local, and even died local. (To quote the mortician who opens the movie: “I make ‘em look better dead than they did alive!”) A Brooklyn where you could be well into adulthood and not know where the Met was. A Brooklyn where multiple generations lived under one roof, people listened to Vikki Carr records, and family, for better or worse, stopped by unannounced.
8. The Warriors: Is The Warriors the best gang movie that takes place in Brooklyn? Maybe. But more importantly, for years—years—it was the Saturday Afternoon Movie on Channel 11. Since, as previously mentioned, no one had cable, lots of people watched the Saturday Afternoon Movie. Mainly Gen X kids. So this is here not just because of the scrappy Warriors, who bebop their way from the Bronx back home to Coney Island safely, but because this film and its aesthetic are deeply ingrained in the psyche of many an Old Brooklynite.
9. Girlfight: Michelle Rodriguez shines here as a frustrated Brooklyn teen, mourning the loss of her mother, seeking love and an outlet for some of her anger and frustrations with the world. It captures the streets of Brooklyn and the subculture of the boxing community, but more than anything, it’s a window into the life of a young woman who finds her own spark.
10. Requiem for a Dream: In this story of addiction, Darren Aronofsky captures the subtle and unspoken class stratum, sanctioned and street, that plays out in intra-Brooklyn social circles. It’s a universal tale of desperation, yes, but it’s a peculiarly Brooklyn story of ambition as well. The poor kid from Coney Island trying to impress the “rich girl” from Manhattan Beach! The kids who used to boost TVs, opening a store in Manhattan! A mom who gets to be on TV! It also memorializes a timeless Brooklyn pastime: Old ladies sitting on beach chairs outside an apartment building, gossiping. I knew these ladies, I passed these ladies—I feared these ladies.
11. I Got a Story to Tell: Nobody repped for Brooklyn harder than the Notorious B.I.G., but this doc gives you a window not just into the artist and his rise, but into the version of Brooklyn—one filled with artists, jazz, the lure of the streets, and the pull of home—that shaped him and the lyrics loved around the world.
12. Holy Rollers: You can’t get a full picture of Brooklyn without a glimpse into one of the borough’s several Hasidic communities. Based on a real-life story, this tale of a young rabbinical student from Borough Park who was lured into an international ecstasy-trafficking ring somehow does that while also giving the audience a dive into the ’90s club scene. The story only gets more wild from there, and star Jesse Eisenberg is, as usual, pretty excellent.
13. Dog Day Afternoon: People sometimes forget that this beloved piece of cinema was based on real events, but not in Brooklyn, where the robbery that inspired the film is still known as “the most dramatic incident to ever take place on this small stretch” of Avenue P and where watch parties are held on the anniversary of the actual crime.
14. Half Nelson: I was debating whether or not to put this on here. In a statement that will not assuage the fears of any parent of an NYC public-school student: I have known a lot of really good teachers who loved their students and their professions and who also have had some … questionable habits with hard drugs. So, the very premise of this film felt very real to me, and yes, Ryan Gosling shines, but so does Shareeka Epps, who embodies her role as Gosling’s student with a quiet curiosity and loneliness that is palatable.
15. Saturday Night Fever: Few films capture the sense of high stakes that come with feeling “important” in your neighborhood the way that this movie does, even as it lays bare the well-documented bias and bigotry that has long plagued much of South Brooklyn. But as a kid watching this movie a million times over, it also put into words a feeling I understood but didn’t realize was universal … of being of a place, but wanting to know what was on the other side of the river.