Off Jackson Avenue: Critic Reviews

Not the first movie to follow a victim of sex trafficking into a living nightmare.

Amusingly improbable.

A nicely done first feature from writer-director John-Luke Montias, Off Jackson Avenue has a rich sense of place and enough confidence in its story that it doesn't need to have its characters collide, Crash-style, until they have to.

Its laid-back absurdist tone and no-nonsense pacing make for an audio-visual delight.

If there really are 8 million stories in the naked city, you'd think that writer-director John-Luke Montias would have come up with more convincing scenarios for his Queens-based movie Off Jackson Avenue.

Count me in for this filmmaker's next offering. I detect a burgeoning talent here.

Gritty inner city drama with a message presented by new names and faces makes a great film.

Mildly engaging, but often contrived and dull with stilted dialogue that lacks much-needed pizzazz.

An urban wasteland gritty slice of life dramatic collision of a seriously hallucinating multinational Japanese hitman, bottom feeder car thieves, and a Long Island City immigrant sex slave uprising.

In Off Jackson Avenue, Olivia is gutsy, shrewd, and fed up in a way that makes her look ripe for a Quentin Tarantino movie.

So pressed to push plot, the filmmaker deserts little (big) things, like location attributes and character quirks. Much of the fodder is slippery pastiche, winking flirtations at elders who do gangster capers better and bolder.

This indie drama deserves points for effort, but the movie's micro-budget is often difficult to ignore.

A well-constructed crime drama in which three characters find themselves in tight squeezes and try to squirm free.

Like a less didactic version of Crash, John-Luke Montias's multiculti, multithreaded drama forces a handful of disparate characters to converge for no purpose other than narrative closure.

Sex slavery, Japanese hit men, and ordinary car thieves converge on the mean streets of Long Island City in Off Jackson Avenue, John-Luke Montias's engagingly lurid but ultimately tepid crime drama.

It builds to a satisfying and almost funny denouement with a cleverly intricate sequence involving all of the primary characters of the plot.