The 234 Apartment

Claudia Angulo and her four children live in Orange Cove, California, a corner of Fresno County known for its citrus. She says when planes fly over the orange grove next to their apartment building and spray pesticides on the trees, she and her family experience headaches , exhaustion and difficulty breathing. But Angulo is concerned about an even more serious health problem in her 11-year-old son Isaac. When she was pregnant with him, she worked at a packing house, handling freshly picked citrus . After Isaac was born, Angulo says she noticed his development seemed slow and strange. “I saw that he didn’t play the same as other kids,” she says. “He didn’t learn the same.” She says his behavior was aggressive and antisocial. And she tells a story about the time he even threatened suicide — when he was only four years old. When he was five, a doctor diagnosed with him ADHD. Angulo says several other pregnant women she worked with at the packing house also had children who developed behav...

An uncaring system putting blameless men behind bars has been a cinematic staple as far back as Alfred Hitchcock's "The Wrong Man" and likely further. But few examples have been as effective as the fact-based "Crown Heights." Winner of Sundance's coveted audience award in dramatic competition, "Crown Heights" is adapted from an episode of public radio's "This American Life" and named after the Brooklyn neighborhood where its main characters live and work. As written and directed by Matt Ruskin, the film is finely balanced between two parallel sets of astonishments. One that an innocent man, Colin Warner, could spend 20 years in prison after being handed a potential life sentence on the flimsiest of evidence. The other, equally amazing, is that people who loved and believed in Warner fought for years against inertia and crushing difficulty to get him out. What the good people do is as powerful as the bad here, and that makes all t...