10 Movies To Watch If You Like Boyz N The Hood

Boyz n the Hood is hard to top, but there are many other great movies worth watching that feature the challenges of growing up Black in America.

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John Singleton’s seminal urban coming-of-age drama, Boyz N The Hood, turns 30 years old this coming July. Written and directed at the age of 24 years old, Singleton became the youngest filmmaker in history to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, besting the great Orson Welles by two years. Singleton also earned a Best Original Screenplay nod for the film.

With powerful performances, lovable characters, a compelling story, and a cautionary message about the escalating street violence that claims the lives of so many young ones, Boyz n the Hood has been imitated by many, but never quite duplicated.

10 South Central (1992)

Adapted from the 1987 novel Crips by Donald Bakeer, South Central is an uplifting tale of a reformed criminal who vows to teach his son right from wrong after being released from prison.

Written and directed by Stephen Millburn Anderson, the movie traces the moral evolution of Bobby (Glenn Plummer), a Hoover Street Crip gang member sent to prison for violating parole. After a 10-year stint, Bobby reforms himself for the good of his son Johnny, who was born while he was imprisoned. When he is released, Bobby becomes a positive role model for Jimmy, who is headed down the wrong path.

9 Cooley High (1975)

While made two decades before Boyz n the Hood, Cooley High is a wonderful coming-of-age story about Preach (Glynn Turman) and Cochise (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), two lighthearted, fun-loving best friends attending high-school in 1964 Chicago.

Preach is an aspiring playwright and Cochise is a coveted basketball star, both of whom have a bright future. But when they are falsely accused of stealing a Cadillac, their lives are forever altered by the criminal stigma attached to their reputation. The deft mix of comedy and drama is second to none.

8 Clockers (1995)

Strike (Mekhi Phifer) is a good-hearted young drug dealer with a poetic soul who is trapped in the Brooklyn projects where he grew up. Surviving day to day with violence swirling all around him, Strike’s life is upended when he becomes entangled in a murder that he did not commit.

7 Fresh (1994)

Boaz Yakin’s Fresh is a character-driven crime tale about a 12-year-old boy (Sean Nelson) who uses his wits and wiles to lift him and his drug-addicted sister, Nichole (N’Bushe Wright), out of their violence-ridden, poverty-stricken, Brooklyn innercity life.

Fed up with being a preteen drug-runner, Fresh pulls himself out of his dead-end lifestyle by investing his time and energy in the game of chess, a pastime his drunk father, Sam (Samuel L. Jackson), teaches him. Thinking three moves ahead, Fresh outsmarts a local drug dealer connected to Nichole.

6 Dope (2015)

When it comes to urban coming-of-age tales, writer/director Rick Famuyiwa has a penchant for defying stereotypes in his films through feel-good humor. In Dope, Malcolm (Shameik Moore) embraces his geeky side, despite growing up in a rough and tumble neighborhood in Inglewood, California.

Along with his friends and punk-rock bandmates, Jib (Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemmons), Malcolm gets swept up in a dope-dealing scheme in order to gain clout among the popular gangsters in his neighborhood. After an adventure of a lifetime, Malcolm uses his bright intellect to distinguish right from wrong.

5 Baby Boy (2001)

While John Singleton’s Poetic Justice and Higher Learning could be included here, his 2001 film, Baby Boy, is the most germane story to watch alongside Boyz n the Hood.

Tyrese Gibson stars in the film as Jody, a jobless 20-year-old single father living with his mother in gang-ridden South Central Los Angeles. Immature and irresponsible, Jody is forced to grow up and provide for his two children from different mothers, while deciding which lover he wants to spend the rest of his life with.

4 New Jack City (1991)

New Jack City stars Wesley Snipes as Nino Brown, the biggest and most feared drug dealer in Harlem, New York, during the city’s crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-1980s. Along with his Cash Money Brother, Gee Money (Allen Payne), Nino becomes the target of undercover cop Scotty Appleton (Ice-T).

The further Scotty goes undercover as a drug dealer, the more he blurs the line between hero and villain and loses himself in the process. The anti-drug messaging is just as powerful as Boyz n the Hood’s repudiation of gang violence.

3 The Wood (1999)

In many ways, Rick Famuyiwa’s The Wood depicts the flipside of Boyz n the Hood. Set in close proximity to each other in South Central L.A., The Wood (named for Inglewood, California) takes a much more uplifting and lighthearted approach to the coming-of-age template.

With his wedding day approaching, Roland (Taye Diggs) gets cold feet. To help calm his nerves, he and his two best friends, Mike (Omar Epps) and Slim (Richard T. Jones), recall their days growing up in The Wood in the 1980s, attending their first school dance, confronting their first love, and avoiding the violent trappings of their neighborhood.

2 Juice (1992)

Omar Epps also gives a fantastic performance in Juice, a heartfelt character-driven tale of ambition and betrayal among four best friends in Harlem during the early 1990s.

Q (Epps), Bishop (Tupac Shakur), Steel (Jermain Hopkins), and Raheem (Khalil Kain) spend their days ditching school, going to the arcade, record store, pool hall, and other neighborhood haunts to kill time and have fun. When Bishop proposes robbing a liquor store to gain neighborhood clout, the foursome faces a severe test of loyalty that ends in a cautionary message for the ages.

1 Menace II Society (1993)

In their feature debut, Albert and Allen Hughes wrote, directed, and produced Menace II Society, a stark, powerful, eye-opening tale of gang violence in Watts, California.

The film revolves around Caine Lawson (Tyrin Turner), a teenage hustler who grew up surrounded by violent drug dealers and gang members. After a devastating incident, Caine tries to flee the lifestyle and walk straight and narrow. However, the life he’s accustomed to is much harder to abandon than he thinks.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/best-movies-similar-like-boyz-n-the-hood/