20 Best Indie Movies Of 2016

Ira Sachs last film, the critically acclaimed Love Is Strange, dealt with the impact on a same-sex couple torn apart by Manhattan’s ever-increasingly expensive property market. For his latest film Little Men, Sachs stays on familiar ground but switches the action to Brooklyn and the emerging friendship between two teenaged boys as their parents come to blows over rising rent, gentrification and entitlement.

Greg Kinnear stars as a down on his luck actor who inherits an attractive Brooklyn brownstone from his later father and moves in with his breadwinner wife and introverted, arty son Jake (Theo Taplitz).

An unlikely camaraderie is struck up between Jake and Tony (Michael Barbieri) – the outgoing, aspiring actor son of the seamstress that rents the first-floor shop of the property – but is threatened when Kinnear’s character demands she start paying higher rates that his father was seemingly too sympathetic to enforce himself.

It’s a simple yet moving coming-of-age story exploring the complexities of modern urban living told through the eyes of its two teenage protagonists that’s firmly placed Barbieri and Taplitz as two young talents to watch.