SOURCE: Kehr, Dave. “Hip-Hop Romeo, Hasidic Juliet.” New York Times (17 August 2001): B8, E8.

In the following review of Marc Levin's Brooklyn Babylon—a film loosely based on Romeo and Juliet—Kehr finds the film's ending unnecessarily ambiguous.

Brooklyn Babylon begins with some pointed intercutting between a Jamaican rap band in rehearsal and a Hasidic wedding in ecstatic progress. The director, Marc Levin, is establishing images of two cultures on a collision course—the setting is the divided Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn—but he is also suggesting how much the two groups have in common.

Not only do the keening rhythms of the wedding cantor find an echo in the emphatic phrasing of the rap vocalist (played by Tariq Trotter, backed by the Grammy-winning band the Roots), but they also share a common subject matter. The Rastafarian rappers and the Hasidic celebrators find inspiration in the same biblical...