'68

This low-budget, independently produced film presents its personal coming-of-age stories against the backdrop of an America undergoing a rite of passage of its own. In San Francisco in 1968, Zoltan Szabo (Sandor Tecsi) and his wife, Zsuzsa (Anna Dukasz), run a small restaurant with the help of their sons, Peter (Eric Larson), a student at Berkeley, and Sandy (Robert Locke). Peter is unjustly suspended from college, takes a job in a motorcycle shop, and volunteers to do campaign work for Robert Kennedy, while trying to make sense of the political upheaval around him. Sandy decides that he is gay, volunteers for the Army, and then, realizing that he wants no part of Vietnam, uses his homosexuality to get out again. All of this is too much for their father, whose life is already complicated by the affair he is having with his waitress. '68 does an adequate job of evoking its period, but writer-director Steven Kovacs, who based the film on his own experience as an immigrant's son during the 60s, has tried to cram so many events into the picture that his characters never develop beyond caricatures. Those drawn to 60s nostalgia will find plenty to interest them here, if little to aid their understanding the period. (official distributor synopsis)