I found this movie incredibly powerful when i first saw it at the cinema. Rewatching it a few years later, it left me luke warm. Is it me, or has it dated badly?

This is one of my favorite movies of all time. The realism of the characters and the situations present gives a person something to think about. Really well acted and well written, as these are characters you really care about and hope to see them do well. When I seen Ricky get shot that was a shocker to me as he was the last person I would have expected this to happen to. This is a movie I can never get sick of watching.

Powerful

a really great movie that shows how important it is to have a positive father-figure around you when your'e growing up

91.000

Preachy is not usually a valid criticism for me, and it certainly isn't here. I hate how people try to cut down any movie that tries to explicitly say something important. Why don't we just chop the balls off of the entire movie industry? Subtle =/= better. Anyway, the movie is pretty good and highly influential.

Great movie, Laurence Fishburne is awesome as the (amazingly named) Furious Styles

A classic hood movie, which makes us care about the characters and thus about the violence of the world he lives in.

Earnest, well-acted. Perhaps too earnest.

Really well done. Makes ya thankful ya don't live these guys' lives.

John Singleton has the sensibility of any garden-variety, cliche-abusing hack. Just because he is black (brought up in the upper middle class, however) does not make his characters any more real; here, they are cardboard cut-outs, with no complexity, contradiction, or more than one side to their personality, except that the two brothers are overly sympathetic. The ending is not only predictable, but it makes us wonder what the hell the point is. "Life is hard in the ghetto"? Uh, okay.