Chop Shop
Koch Lorber Films | Release Date: February 27, 2008 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
83
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 20 Critic Reviews
Positive:
20
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
TV Guide MagazineKen Fox
Bahrani's willingness to expose the shameful reality of third-world conditions in the Land of Plenty while telling a crackling good story marks him as a filmmaker as important as he is accessible. Read full review
100
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
Beautifully observed, and beautifully acted by the novice thespian Polanco (culled from a New York City public school), Chop Shop is at once a heartbreaker and a story of hope and the American Dream. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Now we have an American film with the raw power of “City of God” or “Pixote,” a film that does something unexpected, and inspired, and brave. Read full review
90
SalonAndrew O'Hehir
Announces the arrival of a director radically out of step with the dominant conventions of American moviemaking, one who blends a social-realist vision and a passion for cinematic poetry. Read full review
90
Washington PostJohn Anderson
The director has created a not-to-miss gem for the discriminating viewer. Read full review
88
New York Daily NewsJack Mathews
Ale's community is like a band of pirates - collegial, bickering, larcenous and supportive - and his life within it is both heartening and heartbreaking. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
Small but sure, the film is like Alejandro himself: quick on its feet, attuned to a harsh life’s hardships and possibilities. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
Everything about Chop Shop is modest - the movie's scale, the characters' ambitions. Another director might have tried to nudge the film's grim detours toward tragedy. And that might have worked, too. But Bahrani is a refreshingly deceptive director in that sense. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubScott Tobias
Though Chop Shop is an American film, it feels more like an Iranian movie or the Dardenne Brothers’ "Rosetta"; Bahrani introduces something like a plot point in the late-going, but he mostly focuses, to riveting effect, on how his young hero hustles and claws through everyday life. Read full review
83
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
It's like a New York City equivalent of a Third World bazaar: It hums with nerviness and cunning. And this movie presents a tingling vision of a working neighborhood after hours. Night falls in Chop Shop like a comfort, a cloak or a shroud. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterMichael Rechtshaffen
Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani has followed up his well-received Man Push Cart with another penetrating portrait of life on the outskirts of New York. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
Bahrani’s concentration is close to supernatural as he tracks the young, prepubescent Ale (Alejandro Polanco) from job to soul-numbing job, some legal, some extralegal, to the point where you’re forced to suspend altogether your moral judgments and watch with a mixture of pain and awe. Read full review
80
Village VoiceNathan Lee
Authentic as all this feels (and smells, and tastes), Chop Shop gives off a heightened sense of reality, a faintly idealized atmosphere akin to the Lower East Side milieu of "Raising Victor Vargas," a close relative in the New York branch of neo-neorealism. Read full review
80
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
There is nonetheless a lyricism at its heart, an unsentimental, soulful appreciation of the grace that resides in even the meanest struggle for survival. Read full review
80
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
In this littered environment there's no such thing as trash, only salvage, and the biggest threat to the siblings' humanity is a creeping tendency to think of themselves as commodities as well. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesKevin Thomas
Chop Shop"exudes a sense of joyousness amid harshness. Bahrani celebrates those who never give up, no matter how badly their dreams are shattered. Read full review
75
New York PostLou Lumenick
Bahrani's unsentimental film is perhaps most interesting as a look at a colorful, little-known world that has recently been targeted for urban renewal. Read full review
70
VarietyTodd McCarthy
Ultimately, the pic will be noted and remembered not for any inherent drama or analysis but for its simply having so thoroughly documented a strange place most people have never seen and never knew existed. Read full review
67
Entertainment WeeklyLisa Schwarzbaum
As he did in his striking 2005 first feature film, "Man Push Cart," about a Pakistani street vendor in New York, perceptive indie filmmaker Ramin Bahrani looks at what others overlook and finds drama in everyday details. Read full review
67
Seattle Post-IntelligencerBill White
It is ironic that the core audience for Chop Shop is that very crowd that has recently taken steps to redevelop the Iron Triangle into something more Manhattan-friendly. Read full review
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