An unforgettable and thoroughly engrossing movie that's certainly not just for fans of basketball.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 31, 2024

It remains the greatest, most incredibly moving sports documentary ever made...

| May 28, 2024

Recruiters, coaches, teachers–even the boys’ fathers–could be easy targets, but the filmmakers forgo cheap shots.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 7, 2022

It’s a compelling story that gives you an in depth look at their world.

| May 16, 2022

It's the film's humanity which is at the core of its genius. It takes its subject seriously. It never sneers or judges. It sees the context and is wise enough not to hold itself aloof.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 2, 2020

It's still a miraculous achievement that has rarely been emulated.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 28, 2020

At once a rigorous exploration of the sports-educational industrial complex and an intimate piece of portraiture...

| Mar 27, 2020

The film is rich in backstage tension, from Agee's bad grades to Gates's knee injuries, while the glaring social inequality is reflected in the violent fathers and criminal friends who populate the outskirts of the tale.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 28, 2019

Perhaps James's biggest achievement is his unshowy emphasis on the poetry of basketball itself: the jump shot, the slam-dunk, ecstatic physical expressions of pure transcendental success.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 25, 2019

It is impossible to watch this story of kids who have dreams of becoming rich and famous by way of professional basketball without a sense of nostalgia and even sadness.

| Aug 28, 2018

Utterly, heartbreakingly lucid.

| Apr 10, 2018

The film is a rare three-dimensional account of African-American lives and a stinging indictment of an educational system which, with its sports scholarships, institutionalises bribery.

| Nov 30, 2017

Hoop Dreams was declared a masterpiece early on, and decades later its prestige hasn't diminished one bit.

| Aug 15, 2017

... well worth your time for the up close and personal view it provides of how issues of race and class play out in the lives of these talented young men and their families.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 19, 2016

Steve James's remarkable example of cinma vrit tells the problematic journey of high school basketball stars William Gates and Arthur Agee, two African-American teenagers growing up in Chicago ghettos.

| Original Score: A+ | Jul 16, 2013

| Original Score: A | Sep 7, 2011

It slam-dunks documentaries that are so close-up to their subjects they cannot note the irony of adult commercialism and hard-sell hoopla overwhelming barely literate kids.

| Aug 7, 2011

Epic is a word that suits Hoop Dreams well: The film seems to encompass not just a few individuals' stories, but draw archetypes out of them to personify the larger world around.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 24, 2011

Stunning documentary, great for older kids.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 1, 2011

It's about three hours long. But it moves like Isiah, fast and smooth, and it's over in a heartbreak.

| Aug 3, 2008