The City Review
By Julia Levin
Good
The people of David Riker's The City (La Ciudad) are easily recognizable: poor destitute Mexican immigrants living in listless boroughs of New York City. And the director's careful, patient examination of their incessant, daily struggle to survive by taking any job they can get constitutes most of what the film is about.
The City is comprised of four short vignettes, all very poetic in their open-endedness. In the first one, Bricks, a group of Mexican laborers is taken to the field of nearly ruined buildings. They are left in the middle of nowhere and promised 50 dollars a day for cleaning up bricks. When the ruins of a demolished building collapse and kill one of the workers, the rest can't even explain to the ambulance where they are.
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