Liberty Heights, the fourth instalment of Barry Levinson's Baltimore series, might have been a penetrating study of a period riven with simmering prejudice. But, it ends up being a congenial shamble down memory lane, writes David Parkinson.

Prompted by a disparaging reference to Judaism in a review of Sphere, Levinson clearly regards this as an important personal statement. He's correct in identifying the mid-1950s as an era of discrimination with race, class, religion, politics and sexual orientation all meriting at least a passing mention.

But, in order to reach a mainstream audience, he has been forced to draw the sting from his analysis and present his comments either in the form of acerbic asides to the human drama or by means of clumsily stereotypical opposites. Similarly, several themes are broached only to be dropped almost immediately.

But Levinson is also guilty of sexism, as both young Ben Foster and Adrien Brody find their romantic idyll outside their own race, while the only portrait we get of Jewish-American womanhood is a doting mother and a nosy Yiddish Buba.

Yes, these were pernicious times and Levinson is to be commended for denouncing them. But their surface is barely scratched in this Neil Simonesque collection of rites-of-passage vignettes.