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Polonco plays the young boy known as Ale, an orphan who has learned to fend for himself—selling candy on subway trains, bootleg DVDs wherever he can, snatching the occasional handbag, and learning a trade under the benevolent eye of Rob, who owns an auto-body shop in the Queens neighborhood known as the Iron Triangle. Rob also lets Ale sleep in a tiny upstairs room. Ale seems to have his life in order, but he isn’t content: he fears that his older sister is falling under the influence of the wrong friends and wants to take her under his protective wing. His dream is to save enough money for them to buy a lunch wagon that they will run together. He also persuades her to move in with him so she will be safe.

Chop Shop is a slice of life with vivid, indelible characters. Young, precocious Ale is a force of nature, blessed with street smarts yet still a child—in ways he can’t fully understand.

In describing Chop Shop, most critics invoked the names of landmark Italian neorealist films like Open City, Paisa, and Bicycle Thieves, with good reason. Like those films, Bahrani ennobles his disenfranchised characters, shooting day and night in real locations (with his usual cinematographer, Michael Simmonds), and using nonprofessional actors, including the actual owner of the auto-body shop and the leading player from his previous film, Ahmad Razvi. But as he immersed himself in the Iron Triangle, the director wasn’t thinking of the Italians who made such moving stories about the under-classes. He recalls saying to himself, “If Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados were to be made today and in America, it would be made here.” If you’ve ever seen that unforgettable film about juvenile delinquents, you know this much about the gifted Ramin Bahrani: he has excellent role models.

15. CITIZEN RUTH

(1996)

Directed by Alexander Payne

Screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor

Actors:

LAURA DERN

MARY KAY PLACE

KURTWOOD SMITH

SWOOSIE KURTZ

KELLY PRESTON

M. C. GAINEY

KENNETH MARS

DAVID GRAF

ALICIA WITT

BURT REYNOLDS

TIPPI HEDREN

Satire, Broadway playwright George S. Kaufman once famously observed, is what closes on Saturday night. That sentiment is as true today as it was when he made his caustic remark, because audiences haven’t changed much since the 1920s. They generally want to be entertained, and when they go to see a comedy (or something purporting to be a comedy) they want to laugh. They don’t want to have their foibles pointed out to them, nor do they particularly want to think. For these and other reasons, satire is a rare commodity on stage and screen.

All the more reason to celebrate the work of filmmaker Alexander Payne and his longtime writing partner Jim Taylor. Citizen Ruth marked their feature-film debut, and the promise in this endeavor has been realized in their subsequent work, which includes Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways. They specialize in social satire and observations about the American psyche. They have been criticized from time to time for being mean-spirited, but I prefer to think that they’re expressing their point of view about characters who just possibly deserve to be made fun of.

The gifted Laura Dern plays the title character in Citizen Ruth, set in Payne’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. Ruth Stoops is a mess, a woman who lives on the streets and subsists by inhaling paint fumes from a brown paper bag. When she is arrested—not for the first time—and it’s discovered that she is pregnant, a judge orders her to have an abortion or face jail time. At this point, a pro-life activist couple (played to perfection by Mary Kay Place and Kurtwood Smith) come to Ruth’s “rescue,” taking her into their home where they try to indoctrinate her to their way of thinking. This sets off a battle of wills between the pro-lifers and an equally vocal abortion-rights group.

Payne and Taylor don’t take sides; they allow both groups to express their feelings about this hot-button issue. Instead, they make fun of extremists and their behavior—and the hypocrisy of their campaign to “save” a woman whose only concern