Writer-director John Singleton’s groundbreaking and politically astute portrait of three young men growing up in South Central Los Angeles. Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr) is sent to live with his father, Furious Styles (Laurence Fishburne), in tough South Central Los Angeles. Although his hard-nosed father instills proper values and respect in him, and his devout girlfriend Brandi (Nia Long) teaches him about faith, Tre’s friends Doughboy (Ice Cube) and Ricky (Morris Chestnut) don’t have the same kind of support and are drawn into the neighbourhood’s booming drug and gang culture, with increasingly tragic results…
Singleton became the youngest person ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director
In 1991, at just 23 years old, John Singleton made his explosively powerful debut with Boyz N the Hood, a film for which he deserved – and largely got — the kind of respect Scorsese earned for Mean Streets. […] Boyz N the Hood is a passionate drama shot with fluency and style, a study of what amounts to life during wartime, with people grimly used to gunfire and helicopters thudding overhead. Watched again, a quarter of a century on, what is so striking is not the confrontational aggression but the movie’s humanity, idealism and lack of cynicism.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (2016)
Singleton’s powerhouse movie has the impact of a stun gun.
David Ansen, Newsweek
On the surface, the film appears to be about Black crime and Black children coming of age, but just outside the frame Singleton is saying something more. Systemic racism is the real villain in this movie.
Lawrence Ware, New York Times
Alongside Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, this was the most astonishing and hard-hitting directorial debut of the 1990s.
David Parkinson, Radio Times
John Singleton
Cuba Gooding Jr, Laurence Fishburne, Ice Cube, Angela Bassett, Morris Chestnut, Tyra Ferrell, Regina King, Nia Long
USA
1991
English
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Credits
Producer
Steve Nicolaides
Screenwriter
John Singleton
Cinematography
Charles Mills
Editor
Bruce Cannon
Original Music
Stanley Clarke
Production Design
Bruce Bellamy
90s, Baby!
Ten years. 11 weeks. 90 films from the 1990s. This summer, 90’s Baby! takes a deep dive into a defining decade of cinema.
GoodFellas
The ultimate crash and burn movie, Scorsese's exhilarating gangster film is infused with the excitement of fast cash, girls, guns and drugs. Yet this brazenly amoral movie also captures the brutality, betrayal, and spiritual void of the criminal world.
Madonna: Truth or Dare
A year in the life of Madonna at the height of her fame, touring Blonde Ambition through 1990. There's concert footage, but the movie is also daringly truthful about life behind the scenes — not that Madonna is every really off-stage.
Pulp Fiction + The ReViberators
In the spirit of Quentin Tarantino, we're going to launch our summer series 90s, Baby! smack in the middle, with 1994's Pulp Fiction, the most exciting and influential movie of its era. On 35mm. Preceded by surf guitar sensations The ReViberators live!
Jacob's Ladder
Ever feel you're losing your mind? Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) comes back from the Vietnam War with a firefight in his head. Sanity is a losing battle in Adrian Lyne's terrifying psychological thriller.
Reservoir Dogs
Quentin Tarantino announced himself to the world with this ingeniously fractured heist movie, carved into character-centric chapters, riffing breezily on pop culture, but counterpointing all this with blood-soaked intensity.
Total Recall
The master of the subversive blockbuster, Paul Verhoeven concocts a film about corporate mind-control vs. revolutionary uprising by setting it on Mars and allowing for the possibility the whole thing is just an escapist fantasy...
True Romance
Rockabilly comic book clerk Clarence (Christian Slater) meets dream girl Alabama (Patricia Arquette) with trouble in her wake, in this seminal couple on the run thriller from Quentin Tarantino's excitable mind.
The Company of Strangers
In this Canadian gem, seven elderly women find themselves stranded when their bus breaks down in the wilderness. With only their wits, memories and some roasted frogs' legs to sustain them, this remarkable group of strangers share their life stories.
Boyz n the Hood
Twenty-three-year-old writer-director John Singleton's groundbreaking portrait of three young men growing up in South Central is a film of integrity and compassion. It's a far richer portrait of Black lives than Hollywood's gangsta exploitation pics.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
In 2029, Earth has been ravaged by the war between the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet and the human resistance. (Yep.) James Cameron's all too relevant action movie is in some ways unsurpassed. Linda Hamilton is the mom we all need right now.
Thelma & Louise
In this iconic feminist road movie BFF Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon take off for a weekend getaway that turns violent when one of them is attacked. The stakes get higher as they flee the scene. Winner: Best Original Screenplay (Callie Khouri).
Julio Avila Cuban Band Live + The Mambo Kings Film Screening
Feel the heat! Shake your booty as we combine a live set of exhilarating Cuban music followed by a rediscovered 90s barnstormer of a movie starring Latin heartthrobs Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas alongside the likes of Tito Puente and Celia Cruz.
The Silence of the Lambs
Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) gives FBI serial killer hunter Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) pointers from his maximum security cell. But is he trying to aid the investigation, or just messing with her head?
Delicatessen
Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jacquet collaborated with Marc Caro on their first film, a breathlessly inventive and unexpectedly charming comedy about two young lovers evading a cannibal butcher in a post-apocalyptic France.