CITY OF HOPE

Return of the Secaucus Seven
Lianna
Baby, It's You
The Brother from Another Planet
Matewan
Eight Men Out
City of Hope
Passion Fish
The Secret of Roan Inish
Lone Star
Men with Guns (Hombres Armados)
Limbo
Sunshine State
Casa de los Babys
Silver City
Honeydripper

City of Hope is about urban America in 1990, reflected during long days and nights in Hudson City, a decaying New Jersey metropolis where the old power structure is crumbling and a new one is being forged. Joe (Tony Lo Bianco), a successful contractor with strong ties to City Hall, has spent years building a powerful empire based on "Old World" principles — 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.' His son, Nick (Vincent Spano), is a lost soul who escapes the tedium of his no-effort job working for his father with alcohol, drugs, and petty crime with his friends

While Nick desperately wants to find a way out of the system, Wynn (Joe Morton), a black city councilman, is trying to find a way in. Honest, idealistic, but kept on the edges of power, Wynn is struggling to build a constituency. But at times his people think he's sold out or merely want him to start delivering from his position of patronage. When Nick walks off his job in anger, his actions bring about a chain of events that ignites the personal and racial tensions smoldering in Hudson City.

City of Hope (1991) is regarded as one of the most successful of Sayles' attempts to bring sociopolitical density to a screen entertainment. This account of the political and ethical landscape of a New Jersey city in the wake of rampant property development picks over the tribal allegiances of whites, African-Americans, police and the unions as each struggle for "juice", or municipal influence. When an aging apartment block is threatened with "development", a series of confrontations take place on multiple social levels over three days. Critic Walter Chaw described City of Hope as "a closed circle of aspiration and compromise, simple hopes impossibly complicated by the stark realities of life in a kind of wartime". Featuring performances from Sayles regulars David Strathairn — he and Sayles had known each other since Williams College — Chris Cooper, Angela Bassett, Vincent Spano, and the director's partner Maggie Renzi, co-produced by Renzi, scored by Mason Daring, City of Hope remains quintessential Sayles. In Time Out, Geoff Andrew wrote of a "genuinely epic, politically astute, profoundly humanist and dramatically gripping study of the conflicts, compromises and power plays that define life in any community on the verge of economic breakdown."

-- Richard Armstrong, Senses of Cinema