Review

Hard times call for hard films, and few are harder than John Huston’s 1972 Fat City, which centers on a has-been boxer (Stacy Keach, pictured) and a young fighter (a buoyant Jeff Bridges) with more enthusiasm than talent. Set in seedy Stockton, California, the film is slow and uninflected, but Huston’s affection for the milieu and its battered but hopeful denizens keeps it from being a great big downer. (So does Susan Tyrrell’s raucous turn as a slutty barfly.) Even today, Stockton is, evidently, a place where dreams go to die: A sequence in Leslie and Andrew Cockburn’s grim documentary American Casino features block after block of the city’s big, foreclosed-on homes. — David Edelstein