Once more I find myself unable to give one of Chantal Akerman's films an official rating. News From Home is too cerebral and experimental for me to treat it like a regular narrative film. Comprised almost entirely of steady long shots of New York City, Akerman acts as omnipresent narrator reciting real-life letters from her mother received during her time living in the Big Apple. Many of the takes are dull and pointless, but some have a galvanizing beauty: a graffitied subway platform; black children playing stickball on a street lined with parked cars; rows of empty red buses; subway after subway train of tired people going about their business. About halfway through I noticed that the voice-over segments were beginning to be drowned out by the background noise. By the end much of the narration was unintelligible. It gives an odd sense that Akerman was being consumed and assimilated by the city.
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