Chop Shop (The Criterion Collection) 06/23 Blu-ray (Rental)

For his acclaimed follow-up to Man Push Cart, Ramin Bahrani once again turned his camera on a slice of New York City rarely seen on-screen: Willets Point, Queens, an industrial sliver of automotive-repair shops that remains perpetually at risk of being redeveloped off the map. It’s within this precarious ecosystem that twelve-year-old Ale (Alejandro Polanco) must grow up fast, hustling in the neighborhood chop shops to build a more stable life for himself and his sister (Isamar Gonzales) even as their tenuous circumstances force each to compete with other struggling people and make desperate decisions. A deeply human story of a fierce but fragile sibling bond being tested by hardscrabble reality, Chop Shop tempers its sobering authenticity with flights of lyricism and hope. DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES • High-definition digital master, supervised and approved by director Ramin Bahrani, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack • Audio commentary from 2006 featuring Bahrani, director of photography Michael Simmonds, and actor Alejandro Polanco • New program featuring a conversation among Bahrani, Polanco, actor Ahmad Razvi, and assistant director Nicholas Elliott about the making of the film • New conversation between Bahrani and writer and scholar Suketu Mehta on the immigrant experience in New York City and on film • Rehearsal footage from 2006 featuring Polanco and actors Isamar Gonzales and Carlos Zapata • Trailer • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing • PLUS: An essay by novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen