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100Nothing the Hughes brothers have done in their videos for Tone Loc, Tupac Shakur and others prepares you for the controlled intensity and maturity they bring to their stunning feature debut.
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100As well-directed a film as you'll see from America this year, an unsentimental and yet completely involving story of a young man who cannot see a way around his fate.
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100The film is one chillingly authentic scene after another... In the end it's more of a war movie than "Saving Private Ryan" ever was.
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100Bleak, brilliant, and unsparing.
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90Fierce, violent and searing in its observation, the film makes previous excursions seem like a stroll through the park.
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90Though brilliant, Menace II Society is definitely a film to guard yourself against. There's not a trace of softness or sentimentality. At times, the picture takes on the scary you-are-there verisimilitude of a tabloid-TV show.
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A film of great integrity, assurance and political passion, if not driving plot. [26 May 1993, Tempo, p.3]
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88Menace II Society has a devastating impact. Few films possess the power to keep an audience sitting in stunned silence after the end credits begin rolling, but this is one of them.
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80May just be the best in its genre… Entertainment and radical street preaching, all rolled into one. If it tells black kids not to try this at home, it also revels cinematically in blam-blam-you're-dead. This is what makes the movie maddening -- and what gives it strength.
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78As uncomfortable as it is to have your nose shoved in this nightmare, its unforgettable in its violent lyricism and the bloody power of its message.
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75The movie's biggest weakness is in the presentation of Caine's grandparents.... The attempt, it seems, is to show a potentially positive influence in Caine's life. But the grandparents come across as canned characters, corny and concocted. [26 May 1993, Daily Notebook, p.E1]
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75An unusually knowing movie from filmmakers of any age, both in its coldly clinical viewpoint and assured filmmaking style that even puts fresh spin on a routine police interrogation. [26 May 1993, Life, p.8D]
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70Their instincts as filmmakers override their instincts as moralizers. Menace II Society is best--and most shocking--when it just sets out its horrors and lets us find our own way. [26 May 1993, Calendar, p.F-1]
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70More acutely than any movie before, it gives cinematic expression to the hot-tempered, defiantly nihilistic ethos that ignites gangster rap.
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70This shocking, violent, and unsentimental (albeit sensationalized) drama about a second-generation drug dealer (Turner) and the callous world he lives in, produced by "To Sleep With Anger's" Darin Scott, is terrifically acted.
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60It lacks the vision, and the fully defined characters, of "Boyz (in the Hood)." Tyrin never becomes more than the sum of his conflicting impulses--he's a composite sample of a social group rather than a fully-fledged individual.
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60It sets some sort of record for use of the expressions "nigga" and "muthafucka".
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60The Hughes brothers' directing compensates a good bit for the story's predictability. [5 July 1993, p.26]
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25Because the society in Menace II Society is boxed in sociologically, the picture (for all its strengths) is boxed in esthetically. Already, this genre is beginning to seem as much a victim as the victims it portrays.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 8
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Mixed: 0 out of 8
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Negative: 1 out of 8
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KeithP10This is an great film. I give this movie an A+.
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EMael10The best film that accurately presents what goes down in today