My Brother's Wedding, April 1

"Was lost, but now, I'm found": Opening with a man singing "Amazing Grace" at a church service in Watts, My Brother's Wedding sets up an array of ironies. Thirty-year-old Pierce Mundy is emphatically not found, resentful of familiar roles but unable to create new ones, stuck in a love-hate relationship with his family and his community. Pierce rejects the upward mobility represented by buppie brother Wendell and his cartoonish fiancée Sonia—Sonia asks, "Is Pierce retarded?""No, just ghettoized"—but the alternate path laid out by his best friend Soldier only leads to prison or worse. So here Pierce is, working at the family dry-cleaning business, which Burnett uses as a setting for revealing encounters with a range of wonderful supporting characters. Made with a mostly nonprofessional cast and a tiny budget, this is a moving comedy about getting nowhere, an eloquently ambivalent portrayal of the ties that bind.

—Juliet Clark

• Written, Photographed by Burnett. With Everett Silas, Jessie Holmes, Gaye Shannon-Burnett, Ronnie Bell. (115 mins, Color, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission Milestone Film and Video)