The Black Nerds: NEW JACK CITY - 35th Anniversary Screening!

Name: The Black Nerds: NEW JACK CITY - 35th Anniversary Screening!
Start: 2026-01-07T18:45:00-05:00
Location: Revue Cinema

Schedule

Wed, 07 Jan, 2026 at 06:45 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Revue Cinema | Toronto, ON

35th Anniversary Screening!
This New Year, The Black Nerds invites you to ‘sit yo’ $5 a** down before we make change’.

Step into the cold, neo-noir streets of Harlem, a world where ambition, power, and danger pulse in every shadow. New Jack City isn’t just a crime thriller; it’s a cultural reset, a story about Black ingenuity, survival, and the cost of building an empire when the odds are stacked against you.

At the center is Nino Brown, played with magnetic precision by Wesley Snipes. Contrary to the archetypes that exist in The Godfather or Scarface. Nino is nothing like that. He’s unapologetically Black, homegrown, and visionary. A kingpin whose empire is built with poetic cunning, strategy, and charisma. He commands respect and demands attention. And the crazy part? His archetype still resonates today. Hip-hop references him. Anyone who measures power by vision instead of birthright knows Nino’s name. He doesn’t just play the game; he reinvents it, structuring his empire like a corporate fortress, audaciously modern, impossibly glamorous, and dangerously precise.

But this movie isn’t just about the kingpin. Pookie, played by Chris Rock, shows us the human cost of the streets. He’s the addict, the victim, the guy caught up in the machinery of ambition and survival. And man, when you watch Pookie spiral, it hits you. This isn’t sanitized violence. Although stylish, this isn’t glamorized action. This is intimate, familiar, devastating, poetic. It’s the streets talking, and you gotta listen.

Then there’s the soundtrack, straight New Jack Swing, pulsing and relentless. Just like Nino restructured the streets, Teddy Riley and the architects of this sound restructured Black music. Hip-hop, R&B, electronic production. They fused it all to create something urgent, hybrid, and unstoppable. In New Jack City, music and story move together, reflecting the speed, ambition, and tension of a world being reinvented in real time.

In the New Year, we’re stepping into a cold world. We’re studying ambition, driven by a soundtrack that still feels like it’s from another planet, and reflecting on how the game was and still is being reinvented. (FADUMA GURE)