Sidewalk Stories Reviews

Writer-director Charles Lane is nothing if not audacious in his feature debut, a black-and-white, silent comedy that focuses on homelessness through the figure of the Artist (Lane himself), a homeless African-American street artist in New York City who stumbles upon a foundling (Nicole Alysia) and takes the little girl to his squat lodgings. While caring for her and trying to find her mother, he develops a friendship with the middle-class Young Woman (Wilson), who takes both man and child into her heart. Working in silence and in black and white, with an unknown and less-than-upbeat subject matter, Lane asks a big concession of modern audiences, and in adopting a comic persona that pointedly recalls Chaplin's Little Tramp, he forces unfavorable comparisons between his own work and Chaplin's. Still, the film works surprisingly well, in part because contemporary audiences view silent films as "unrealistic" to begin with, making it easier to accept the film's stylized look, sentimentality, and flawed pantomime. SIDEWALK STORIES has more heart than art, but its heart is large, and Lane proves himself an ambitious, impassioned filmmaker.