AVALON is a story of a Jewish-immigrant family who arrives in Baltimore and encounters a brave new world of freedom, self-betterment, and TV sets — i.e., the American Dream. The stern and loving patriarch Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller-Stahl) tell us, ”I came to America in 1914!” His heavily accented voice is breathless, almost childlike, and his mythical arrival at Baltimore Harbor is photographed as though he were entering a giant red-white-and-blue theme park where every day is the Fourth of July. The movie, which is about the passage of the Old World into the New, tells how those who came over from the peasant villages of Eastern Europe found the freedom of America both intoxicating and crazy, and how it was up to the next generation to make the place home.

Set mostly from the mid-’40s through the end of the ’50s, Avalon is a prequel to Director Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) and Tin Men (1987), and in some ways it’s the most personal of the three. (source: Entertainment Weekly)