https://www.hammertonail.com/reviews/paid-in-full-film-review/ What to Watch Tue, 09 Jan 2024 16:08:46 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://www.hammertonail.com/reviews/paid-in-full-film-review/#comment-16024 Tue, 24 Sep 2013 16:58:30 +0000 http://www.hammertonail.com/?p=2204#comment-16024 […] of hip hop MCs, including the great triumvirate of Nas, Biggie, and Jay-Z. Read Nelson Kim’s full HTN review. Available on […]

]]> https://www.hammertonail.com/reviews/paid-in-full-film-review/#comment-15699 Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:15:00 +0000 http://www.hammertonail.com/?p=2204#comment-15699 This movie is a classic! Love this movie

]]> https://www.hammertonail.com/reviews/paid-in-full-film-review/#comment-14396 Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:50:29 +0000 http://www.hammertonail.com/?p=2204#comment-14396 […] Paid in Full (2002) — Charles Stone III’s underrated gangster drama set in 1980s Harlem is genre filmmaking of a high order: what in lesser hands would come across as a retread of clichés instead takes on a nearly classical grandeur. Even the most inventive contemporary crime movies, like the work of Tarantino and the Coens, sometimes seem to be taking place in a world disconnected from recognizable social reality. Stone, in his first feature film (he went on to make the crowd-pleaser Drumline), yanks the genre out of its closed loop of ever-more-baroque film-geek flourishes, and jolts it full of life. Paid in Full restores a sense of tragic consequence to its heroes’ downfall, and many viewers will be left shaken and appalled as the film arcs its way to its conclusion. Most mainstream reviewers ignored the film upon its release, and its distributor, Miramax/Dimension, treated it as just another disposable ‘hood shoot-’em-up. But people will go on rediscovering it on video and talking about it for years to come. (Read Nelson Kim’s full review here.) […]

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