Wild Style is just as important a New York City musical as On the Town, so vital and exuberant are its scenes of a burgeoning cultural moment.
Comment
11/12/08
Wild Style (1982)
88 %
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 16
Fresh: 14
Rotten:2
Average Rating: 6.9/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 30 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: A graffiti "tagger" taken under the wing of an East Village art collector prepares for a festival of rap and hip-hop music. This film details the early 1980's cultural turning point which occurred in the South Bronx, New York, at which time... [More]
Starring: Lee Quinones, Fab 5 Freddy, Patti Astor, Busy Bee
Director: Charlie Ahearn
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Reviews for Wild Style
1 - 16 (sorted by date)
Charlie Ahearn’s groundbreaking film about hip-hop, graffiti, break dancing, and rap in eighties New York celebrates its 25th anniversary with a new 35-mm. print.
11/10/08
Top Critic
It's great to see again this bolt of ghetto joy, a kind of updated West Side Story, that shows hip-hop as a living, breathing expression of cultural resistance rather than a crunky, cheerless set of cruddy grunts and boasts from which to make money.
08/10/07
Nothing else comes close to capturing the atmosphere of the early days of hip-hop and spraycan art, of the burned-out and derelict Bronx.
08/10/07
This unpolished but authentic film, a drama with the honesty of a documentary, shows hip-hop pure and unvarnished.
08/10/07
The acting is stilted, and the story almost non-existent. But that isn't the point, Wild Style is a cult classic - indisputably the most important hip hop movie, ever.
08/10/07
Mixing early-’80s nostalgia with mild social anthropology, the film successfully crystallises the optimism and vivacity of the early New York hip hop scene and suggests that film and TV portrayals of the Bronx as a savage and inhospitable hellhole were pe
01/26/06
Wild Style lacks a lot of the style of the people in it, but it never neutralizes their vitality.
08/30/04
Top Critic Hip-hop rolls on tractor treads now, unafraid to colonize those who hesitate, but in 1982 it was small, self-selecting, and as specific to New York as the World Trade Center.
09/16/03
Top Critic A fascinating study of an era that now feels so remote, it might as well have occurred on another planet.
05/24/03
It's a fascinating time capsule, worth examining for anyone interested in the cultural roots of hip hop.
05/29/01
The pacing is slow -- inexcusable in a film about music -- except when hip-hop takes over, and Ahearn wisely gives plenty of screen time to the likes of Busy Bee, Rock Steady Crew, and Fab Five Freddy.
05/11/01
Top Critic1 - 16 (sorted by date)
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