Rating: 
Summary: This is a study of the effects we can have on each other.
Review: To see the unfolding of street smart detective's personality due to her exposure to the Hasidic Jewish community is intriguing. The music is wonderful. This is one of my favorite videos of all time!
Rating:
Summary: Better than what the critics will have you believe.
Review: Took the advice of friends (and some reviewers here) and got this film. Melanie Griffith is excellent as an undercover cop. There was a little too much fascination with the Hasidic culture and that sacrificed suspense and the flow of the story, but overall, I recommend this film very highly.
Rating: 
Summary: Meshugges
Review: What was Sidney Lumet thinking? his films are not usually derivative. Maybe he needed some quick cash, I don't know. Or maybe he agreed to make this movie before he knew that Melanie (I've talked this way since I was six) Griffith would be cast as the tough female cop who has to infiltrate Diamond District in New York City where many of the Chasidic Jews live.Actually, I'm not as surprised as most people that Griffith was cast in the first place; she was pretty gutsy in Something Wild. But she sleepwalks through this movie, as though she only took the part because she lost a bet. Her whole performance is laughable. She dyes her bleached hair brown for her "cover" as a Jew who has chosen "tshuvah," to return from the secular world to an orthodox lifestyle. Reminds me of when Charlton Heston, acting in A Man for All Seasons, was too vain to remove his toupee, so he made the hairdressers paste a fake bald pate over his fake hair. Anyway, she's among the Chasidim ostensibly to solve the murder of a chasid who was murdered in a jewelry store, but aside from the finding of the body at the beginning, and the shoot'em up at the end, there's very little cop work. Griffith spends the middle part of the film having heart-to-hearts with the adopted daughter of the community's chief rebbe, making mistakes such as opening the dairy refrigerator on meat days, and swooning over Der Rebbe's adopted son, Ariel (means Lion of G-d). Ariel is the community's best Torah scholar, and this fact is established in a conversation with his sister, during which she says that Ariel "studies Torah the way Mozart played the violin." This is merely one, and not the most serious of the errors in detail regarding Judaism. Never take the word of a female relative in assessing a Jewish man. To put it mildly, we exaggerate. They ALL walk on water. She has a failed seduction scene with him, which lacks any electricity or dramatic tension whatsoever. At the end, she has an epiphany, apparently because someone has for the first time, turned her down in order to wait for someone better. I'm not exactly sure of the logic of this; Ariel is waiting for his soulmate and won't settle for some shiksa, and from this, Griffith has now decided to wait for her soulmate too. Though, if I'm too understand the earlier innuendo, Griffith is a day late and a dollar short. Hard-core Griffith fans may like this, and people who really, REALLY like procedurals may prefer it to reruns of Diagnosis Murder, but don't watch it and expect to learn about Judaism. The impression I imagine those unfamiliar with Jewish customs would carry away is that Judaism is fraught with regulations and customs just waiting to be violated. It's nothing like that, really. Judaism is friendly, and upbeat, and not as dour as it is presented here.
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