By LOU LUMENICK
New York Post
At 16, Ben Kurtzman (newcomer Ben Foster) has already learned that "99 percent of the world were the other kind," or, as his mother (Bebe Neuwirth) calls them, "the others." A sign at an exclusive country club reads "No Jews, Dogs or Coloreds Allowed," prompting Ben and his friends Sheldon (Evan Neuman) and Murray (Gerry Rosenthal) to debate just how the club decided that Jews were a bigger threat to decorum than dogs.
Ben is enough of a rebel to dress up as Adolf Hitler for Halloween, much to the horror of his parents, who promptly ground him in one of the movie's funniest scenes. "Put the Fuhrer on the phone," instructs Ben's long-suffering dad Nate, played to perfection by Joe Mantegna, as his Yiddishe grandmother (the scene-stealing Frania Rubinek) wails, "Couldn't you have gone as a pirate or a reindeer?"
Ben tests the limits by pursuing a friendship with the beautiful and self-assured Sylvia (Rebekah Johnson), one of the first black students at his school. While Ben's parents aren't thrilled ("Just kill me now," moans his mom), their relationship is much more of a problem for Sylvia's father (James Pickens Jr.), a wealthy doctor who's angered at finding a middle-class Jew hiding in his daughter's closet when he arrives home unannounced one afternoon.
Levinson deftly intercuts Ben's story with those of the Kurtzman family's other males over a particularly eventful year.
Less naive than his younger brother, college student Van (Adrien Brody) is ruefully aware of the risks entailed when he courts Dubbie (Carolyn Murphy), a blond, horse-riding gentile.
When he and his friends Yussel (David Krumholtz) and Alan (Kevin Sussman) first venture out of the Jewish enclave of Liberty Heights for a party (as "Strangers in Paradise" fills the soundtrack), Yussel narrowly escapes a beating -- and won't return without a new hair color (blond) and a gentile-sounding name (Yates).
Van forms an unsettling friendship with the perverse, hard-drinking Trey (Justin Chambers), who he doesn't realize is Dubbie's boyfriend. Through Trey, Van gets a bittersweet education in the ways of WASPs.
Nate, meanwhile, has plenty of problems of his own.
His numbers operation is failing to keep up with the price of the new Cadillacs Nate purchases every Yom Kippur, and he's forced to greatly exaggerate the take from the struggling burlesque house he uses as a front to bamboozle the IRS.
In desperation, Nate and his partners -- portrayed with panache by Charley Scales, Richard Kline and Vincent Guastaferro -- institute a numbers bonus scheme that backfires, putting them hugely in debt to Little Melvin, a small-time black drug dealer (the hilarious Orlando Jones).
As the three (sometimes contrived) storylines converge over the course of just over two hours, writer-director Levinson pulls you along with razor-sharp dialogue ("I've got a stripper who dresses like my cousin Marsha," Nate complains when a burlesque dancer insists on going on in her street clothes when her costumes don't arrive).
His storytelling is greatly abetted by an astonishing re-creation of place and time on a scale (including a James Brown concert) that in ways exceeds even "Avalon," the most recent film in the Baltimore series.
Besides a stunning collection of vintage cars, there are painstakingly detailed decors that delineate the characters' varying social statuses, from the Kurtzmans' wood-paneled basement to Trey's antique-filled home.
"Liberty Heights," which includes a couple of scenes set in the "Diner" diner, is the best film in the series since that 1982 sleeper, which it also recalls in its flawless (though much larger) ensemble cast. The new film, though more heavily plotted than its predecessors, is easily one of the year's best movies.