Juice

Juice (1992) is Ernest R. Dickerson's first film as a director. Until then he had been Spike Lee's cinematographer, on Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X among others. Four friends in Harlem. They skip school, hang around record shops, and one of them wants to be a DJ. Then they decide to rob a store and it goes wrong. What follows is driven not by an outside threat but by what one of them turns into. That one is Bishop, and it is Tupac Shakur's first leading role. He was known then as a rapper with no acting experience, and he became the most memorable thing in the film. What makes Bishop frightening is not his aggression but the point at which he stops caring about consequences at all. The juice of the title is street usage for respect and standing. All four are chasing it and each pays a different price. It is one of the films that put the hip hop culture of the era on record, and the score was produced by the Bomb Squad. It runs 96 minutes. Good for: nineties urban drama, hip hop culture, and crime films. Less good for: the gun violence and the language are heavy, and the image quality belongs to its period.