Friday

Director: F. Gary Gray

1995 / 97min / 35mm

After starting out as a music video director whose successes included the clip for Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” F. Gary Gray made his feature debut with this beloved stoner comedy starring and cowritten by Cube, forming a peerless double act with Chris Tucker as Jones and Smokey, two unemployed slackers puff-puff-passing their days away in South Central L.A. A ticking clock plot is set in motion—the boys have one day to pay Smokey’s supplier the $200 he’s owed, or they’re dead meat—but what’s unique about Friday is its many detours, and the fond, filthy picture it paints of the working-class Black neighborhood and its many characters, including Bernie Mac’s church pastor, Tiny “Zeus” Lister Jr. as the local bully, and John Witherspoon as Jones’s glued-to-the-toilet father.