37 (2016)
Storyline
On a March night in 1964, 37 neighbors in Queens, New York, witness the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese. None of them takes action or calls the police. 37 tells the story of a few of these people and what led up to the night when they unexplainably remained passive observers. The film is a convincing portrayal of a borough in change and a time characterized by racism, the Civil Rights Movement and political shifts. The actual event that inspired the film’s plot has been called a symbol for the moment when America lost its innocence. The director Puk Grasten skillfully weaves into her feature film debut various fates, dreams and family conflicts by leading us through an apartment building that comes to bear a collective failure.
Directors
Writers
Cast
Trailer
Reviews
42
The critical failure of 37 — because certainly a film is allowed to have disdain for its characters; there is no law that art must care for its subjects — is the fundamental lack of narrative, or even of tension.
40
Village Voice
For all its postures of humanism, the film is remarkably cold toward the victim herself, who appears only briefly.
40
A drama that plays out as an overdetermined thesis, with Genovese herself (Christina Brucato) a footnote to the darkly stylized plunge into lives of quiet desperation.
40
It is a competent if sometimes heavy-handed affair, a mosaic of fictitious and underexplored characters who hear the assault but are too self-preoccupied to act.
38
Slant Magazine
There's a fundamental lack of dramatic exigency in writer-director Puk Grasten's storytelling.
