Tyrin Turner

Music video director Hype Williams made his feature film debut with this visually inventive urban drama. Tommy Brown (DMX) and his friend Sincere (Nas) are gangsters who have learned how to make a good living by dealing drugs and pulling armed robberies. Tommy and Sincere have been able to move out of the ghetto in Queens where they were raised and relocate to an upscale section of Manhattan; they would seem to have it made, but both realize that their lives are headed toward a dead end. Sincere begins getting in touch with his African roots and tries to convince his girlfriend Tionne (Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins) that they should emigrate to the Motherland, while Tommy has a religious awakening and joins the Nation of Islam. Along with top-selling rappers DMX and Nas, hip-hop artist Method Man and R&B singer Taral Hicks also appear. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

A teenager tries to shield his family from his father's violence in this downbeat drama. Jimmy West (Ryan Phillippe) is a young man growing up within a horribly dysfunctional family in a small Texas town. His father Ray (John Savage) is a Vietnam veteran whose physical and emotional scars from the war have turned him into a psychotic; he terrorizes his two younger children, Mikey (Adam Burke) and Mark (Devon Michael), brutalizes his wife Kate (Nastassja Kinski), and sometimes forces Jimmy and Kate to have sex at gunpoint. Jimmy's girlfriend Traci (Jenny Lewis) is about to move away to attend college, and while Jimmy would like to go with her (and with his abilities as a baseball player he could probably win a scholarship), he's afraid to leave his mother and siblings behind with no protection against Ray's abuse. One night, a man stops by Ray's tavern and begins asking questions; the stranger arouses Ray's fear and suspicion, and he never makes it home after an "accident" in the man's room. The death leads the local police to begin asking questions of their own, and soon a number of ugly revelations about the family's history come to light. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This controversial political drama semi-fictionalizes the history of the radical Black Panther Party, an African-American organization that polarized America from 1966-70. Huey Newton (Marcus Chong) and Bobby Seale (Courtney B. Vance) are a pair of Oakland, California, men who form a new political party dedicated to protecting Blacks from bigoted cops through violent means. Their "Black Panther Party for Self-Protection" serves free lunch to kids, educates the community in African-American awareness, gets drug dealers off the streets, and has gun battles with the Oakland police. Two members of the Panther Party are Tyrone (Bokeem Woodbine) and Judge (Kadeem Hardison). When FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Richard Dysart) suspects that the Black Panthers' leftist leanings are an indication of communist involvement, Judge, an affable Vietnam vet, agrees to become a double agent, reporting to both the Feds and the Panthers. After the Panthers storm the State Assembly in Sacramento, political paranoia grows, and Hoover conspires with the mafia to flood urban streets with cheap heroin, thus destroying the party. Director Mario Van Peebles, who also appears in the role of Stokely Carmichael, worked from a script written by his father, Melvin Van Peebles, based on his book about his real-life experiences with the Black Panthers. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide

Laurence Fishburne plays no-nonsense LAPD narc Russell Stevens, Jr., who has worked all his life to expunge the memory of his dope-addict father, whom he saw die in a liquor-store robbery. DEA agent Jerry Carver (Charles Martin Smith) orders Stevens to work as an undercover operative on a major case. The cop is to pose as a dealer in order to get the goods on South American drug lord. Stevens is so convincing as a dealer, that he fast works his way up through the ranks and gains the trust of lawyer and narcotics dealer David Jason (Jeff Goldblum) and his sinister associates, all lackeys to the kingpin who is the target of Stevens' assignment. Through a series of fantastic but credible circumstances, Stevens eliminates the lower echelon, getting closer to his quarry, but in the process he finds himself so deep into the sinister and seductive world of the drug trade that he may never get out. In a surprise move, and just when he is about to bring the ringleader down, the DEA pulls the plug on his assignment, because the top dealer, an influential Latin American politician, may someday be useful to the State Department. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide