New Jack City

Director: Mario Van Peebles

1991 / 100min / 35mm

“They roll with us or we roll over them.” Imperious, brooding, and very quotable, Wesley Snipes’s drug kingpin Nino Brown in New Jack City is one of the screen’s great antiheroes. Ruling over Harlem at the height of the crack epidemic, Brown finds a worthy adversary in the form of Ice-T’s swaggering undercover detective Scotty Appleton, assigned to infiltrate Brown’s organization in order to take him down. A high style ’90s update of the hard-boiled Warner Bros. gangster classics from Van Peebles, who co-stars alongside a young Chris Rock, and keeps the macho melodrama moving to an impeccable New Jack Swing soundtrack.