Boyz n the Hood

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

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