Part of Summer Night Cinema: 50 Years of Hip Hop, celebrating the art form's impact on music, film, and pop culture. Curated by critic Ernest Hardy.
Ernest Dickerson captured the late Tupac Shakur at his iconic, big-screen best in this visually sophisticated 1992 film that revamps and recasts the coming-of-age narrative for the hip hop generation. When a gun-driven dream to escape the grind of daily ’hood life is violently upended, the camaraderie of a group of friends explodes into tragedy. Omar Epps, Khalil Kain, Flex Alexander, Cindy Herron, Samuel L. Jackson, and Queen Latifah are among the cast who bring the story to life. And the soundtrack—featuring luminaries like Too $hort, Eric B. and Rakim, and Cypress Hill—is relentlessly brilliant, from an era when the soundtracks to Black films were almost as big an event as the films themselves.
(1992, dir. Ernest Dickerson, color, 95 minutes)
Summer Night Cinema is sponsored by Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein
