Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

Tyrnauer uses a ton of archival footage to tell his story, and brings it in at a brisk 92 minutes.

She was also one tough cookie who appreciated a good fight. A bit more internal tussle would have both better honored her spirit and made for a better documentary.

Most good documentaries are powered by conflict, and you couldn't ask for a struggle more elemental or relevant to our time than the one chronicled in Citizen Jane: Battle for the City.

This straightforward and bracingly optimistic documentary explains the ways that shaping politics and wielding power can ease urban decline or inflate it.

The movie is scored like a thriller, seemingly building to some terrifying conclusion. And, in a way, it does ...

In the context of today's stymied political trench wars, there is inspiration to be found in Jacobs' example of local activism, original thinking, and rational argument blossoming into useful change.

A bracing, insightful study of how cities are made and sometimes destroyed.

Like his previous film, Valentino: The Last Emperor, about the famous fashion designer, director Matt Tyrnauer takes on a fascinating subject yet mostly consolidates existing information without adding much to our knowledge base.

A plucky intellectual takes on New York's most powerful builder in Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, an engrossing documentary that details a historical conflict that is being repeated around the world today.

A timely warning against big-block buildings with empty ground-floor shop units, nonetheless.

[It] feels like a visualized term paper.

It's his depiction of the adversarial relationship between those making decisions and those affected by them that hits home.