Anurag Yagnik

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Raising Victor Vargas

A latino family with mix of poverty, teenage romance and sexual appetite comes to age in this scrappy, happy, funny and rather awkwardly enjoyable little movie. Peter Sollett directs this movie at a young age of 26 and it often shows. Both in terms of young pitfalls and fascination with sex.

Where Sollette shines is in keeping this movie free from the standard plotlines of young people getting in trouble thru drugs or Police or some craxy sexual crimes of passion. This is a good clean movie -- almost feels out of place in modern day Manhattan.

One cannot help but wonder as to why an old woman with 3 grandkids lives in Manhattan's lower east side anyway. It is a ghetto but could she not find a cheaper ghetto?

Such questions are really not an issue here actually because the film is really in its own world -- almost completely cut off from the cynical surroundings.