All these low-level criminal enterprises and idle dreams aren't happening in Mexico City or Kandahar; they're just outside Queens.

It's a near-masterwork of low-budget precision and improvisation, constructed and rehearsed over many months in collaboration with the actors and the entire Willets Point community.

It's a sharp mixture of neorealist grit and lyricism, and while other writer-directors would treat the sibling relationship at the film's center very differently--more melodramatically, for starters--Bahrani lets us into two improvised lives naturally.

The fact that neither [leads] were professional actors before starring here makes their extraordinarily fluid performances all the more impressive, and helps burnish Chop Shop’s golden aura of genuine discovery.