Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. [Blu-ray]

African-American director Leslie Harris's first feature is a slice-of-life examination of a saucy high-school girl's social and sexual dilemmas. Harris's shot her film for $100,000 in seventeen days and won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival for outstanding achievement in a first feature. The film can be sliced into two distinct sections. The first half concerns Brooklyn high-school student Chantel (Ariyan Johnson) as she deals with academic disagreements with her teachers (at one point getting into shouting match about the Holocaust), takes advantage of her boyfriend's wallet to go on a shopping spree, and confronts yuppies in the Upper West Side gourmet shop where she works. The film turns melodramatic in the second half as Chantel becomes pregnant and tries to evade the responsibility of giving birth while continuing at high school.