A look into the urban snake pit. What writer and director John Sayles (also editor, also bit-player) sees down there is a lot of writhing and slithering, or at any rate a lot of intertwined storylines and mobile, long-take camerawork. The latter puts a long leash on the actors, including such past Saylesian troupers as Vincent Spano (Baby, It's You) and Joe Morton (The Brother from Another Planet), to name two who seem particularly to thrive in the situation. The intertwining of storylines, meanwhile, stretching from City Hall to city sewer, appears to hope to amount to something on the scale of The Bonfire of the Vanities (the book, not the movie), something on the scale of Dickens or Hugo, something very fat and heavy. What it more precisely amounts to is one simplicity piled on top of another until, through some cumulative process of diversion and diversity, disguise and disarray, it attains an illusion of complexity. This is meant as a genuine compliment to a moviemaker who previously had lacked the wherewithal to create an illusion of anything. Only the cold reality of small budgets and good intentions -- the traditional curse of the American liberal. Barbara Williams, Tony Lo Bianco. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd