Amongst Friends

Mr. Weiss is more successful in introducing these people and setting them in motion than he is in allowing sharp, revealing details to emerge from the turmoil that surrounds them.

Amongst Friends would love to be a Mean Streets for the '90s, and its Long Island streets may be mean enough, but here they're barely semi-tough.

Rob Weiss's Amongst Friends, a gangster rites-of-passage tale, owes much to Mean Streets and Goodfellas -- reminiscing voice-overs, bustling hand-held camera, boys bonding and boiling over -- but it has its own slender charm.

In this Jewish Mean Streets, Weiss substituts Scorsese's Italian lowlifes with upper-middle class Jewish youngsters who don't drift into crime but rather choose it consciously as a way of life.