Our 10 Favorite Hip-Hop Related Roger Ebert Movie Reviews [PHOTOS]

Juice (1992)

“Juice is like a reaction to years of movies that have glamorized urban violence. There is a real terror in the faces of these kids as they realize that people have died, that guns kill, that your life can be ruined, or over, in an instant.”

New Jack City (1991)

“I’ve seen a lot of movies where the lifestyle of the drug lord looks seductive—until he’s killed in the last reel, of course—but this isn’t one of them. It’s a character study of a bad man running an evil business, and by the end even his mistress is telling the cops she’ll testify against him.”

Boyz In The Hood (1991)

“Boyz N the Hood has maturity and emotional depth: There are no cheap shots, nothing is thrown in for effect, realism is placed ahead of easy dramatic payoffs, and the audience grows deeply involved. By the end,  I realized I had seen not simply a brilliant directorial debut, but an American film of enormous importance.”

Bamboozled (2000)

“Bamboozled shows black actors in boldly exaggerated blackface for a cable production named “Mantan–The New Millennium Minstrel Show.” Can we see beyond the blackface to its purpose? I had a struggle.”

The Warriors (1979)

“The Warriors is a real peculiarity, a movie about street gang warfare, written and directed as an exercise in mannerism. There’s hardly a moment when we believe that the movie’s gangs are real or that their members are real people or that they inhabit a real city.”

Scarface (1983)

“Scarface understands this criminal personality, with its links between laziness and ruthlessness, grandiosity and low self-esteem, pipe dreams and a chronic inability to be happy. It’s also an exciting crime picture, in the tradition of the 1932 movie.”

Poetic Justice (1993)

“Boyz N the Hood was one of the most powerful and influential films of its time, in 1991. Poetic Justice is not its equal, but does not aspire to be; it is a softer, gentler film, more of a romance than a commentary on social conditions. Janet Jackson provides a lovable center for it, and by the time it’s over we can see more clearly how Boyz presented only part of the South Central reality.”

Bad Boys (1995)

“Bad Boys tries with all the energy at its command to redeem an exhausted story with sheer technique. This movie is so good-looking it deserves a decent screenplay, instead of one more lope down memory lane.”

Hustle & Flow (2005)

“The movie’s first achievement is to immerse us in the daily world of Djay, Howard’s character. He is not a “pimp” and a “drug dealer” as those occupations have been simplified and dramatized in pop culture. He is a focused young man, intelligent, who in another world with other opportunities might have, who knows, gone to college and run for Congress.”

8 Mile (2002)

“The genius of Rabbit is to admit his own weaknesses. This is also the approach of Eminem, who acknowledges in his lyrics that he’s a white man playing in a black man’s field. In the climactic performance scene,  he not only skewers his opponent but preempts any comeback by trashing himself first, before the other guy can.”