Home Boys

Manhattan’s East Village is full of eccentrics, but the sight of six teenage boys with waist-length hair, in Ray-Bans and dark suits—as if Quentin Tarantino had recast Reservoir Dogs—could stop any local in her tracks. That’s what happened to the director Crystal Moselle when, in 2010, she encountered the Angulo brothers. She tells their strange tale in her documentary The Wolfpack, out June 12. Locked in a tenement apartment by the family’s domineering patriarch and homeschooled by their mother, the boys were rarely allowed out; one year they never set foot on the streets at all. Their only escape was a 5,000-title movie collection, which included, of course, Reservoir Dogs. But one day, one of the brothers ventured out without permission, creating a fissure that has been widening ever since. There’s a great opportunity here for a follow-up about the Angulos and their assimilation into the real world; perhaps they will make that movie themselves.