Fresh

Here's a movie filled with drama and excitement, unfolding a plot of brilliant complexity, in which the central character is solemn and silent, saying only what he has to say, revealing himself only strategically. Read full review

The acting by Esposito and Jackson is exceptional, but it is on the remarkable face of Nelson that Yakin shows what gets lost when a child beats criminals at their own game. Read full review

In a harmonic convergence of narrative, cinematic expertise and performance, Nelson’s chilled expression—and this movie—will stay with you like a closely held, personal memory. Read full review

Fresh is an electrifying, sobering movie, and with it, Yakin announces himself as perhaps the most gifted newcomer of the decade. Read full review

Fresh is urgent, impressively thought out, tightly coiled. Written, directed and acted with invigorating subtlety, there's nothing stale about Fresh. It's an original, and it's terrific. [31 Aug 1994, p.27]

The evocative nature of Nelson's stillness is essential to the whole last movement of Fresh, an intricately plotted series of unexpected and related events. In a way, the audience has to read the meaning of the ending in Nelson's face. Fortunately Nelson has a face that can make you believe anything. [31 Aug 1994, p.E1]

Nelson's is one of the year's best performances in nothing less than one of the year's best films. [23 Sep 1994, p.2]

Fresh alchemizes the terrifying cliches of urban melodrama into annihilating poetry. Read full review

Fresh takes the setting and tone of Boyz 'N the Hood and Menace II Society and applies it to a thriller. Gone is the documentary-like quality of filmmaking as well as the gritty sense of immediacy. Fresh uses higher-quality film stock and a more traditional cinematographic style to distance the audience ever-so-slightly from the characters. This way, it's easier to appreciate the complexity of Michael's plan and the manner in which he arranges his masterful scheme of manipulation. Read full review

Fresh is Boyz N the Hood meets Searching for Bobby Fischer. Key to the success of the film is the solemn performance by young Sean Nelson. We stare at him in much the same way as we gazed upon that little girl in the red coat in Schindler's List, a human face walking through a tragedy. Read full review

Unlike previous urban thrillers, such as the harrowing Menace II Society or the heavy-handed Boyz 'N the Hood, Fresh excels because of its delicate handling and gentle pace. It's a movie fueled by hope, not rage. [31 Aug 1994, p.E1]

One might shudder at the occasional Yakin visual metaphor, as when Fresh and a friend enter their young hound in a dogfight. Yes, it's a dog-eat-dog world. But even more powerfully at work here is that Yakin, aided by the coolly honest performance of young Sean Nelson, makes us see that it's really a king-eats-kingpin world. [31 Aug 1994, p.F02]

Step by step, Yakin and the 13-year-old Nelson-who plays his part with a beautifully wary, quiet calm-take you into Fresh's harsh world, accustom you to its murderous routines, ways and lingo, its boredom and sudden violence. Seeing it through Fresh's relatively innocent eyes gives it harrowing edge and clarity. [31 Aug 1994, p.1C]

Fresh is a brilliant first feature by young writer-director Boaz Yakin. It works superbly on at least three levels: as a portrait of the sad toll that ghetto life takes on promising children, as a story of the tenacious moral bonds that can hold a family together, and as a down and dirty thriller. [02 Sep 1994, p.3H]

Fresh features delicate and sympathetic work from both Mr. Esposito and Mr. Jackson, whose fine characterizations say a lot about the originality of this film's vision. Read full review

Fresh is easily one of the best of the new ''hood flicks'' because it doesn't neglect the basics. There's a story here - a good one - and characters you can connect with. Read full review

Yakin never settles for the easy, last-minute moralising and macho posturing that has afflicted much of the otherwise intriguing new black cinema; here, story and character take priority, helped no end by Nelson's quiet, riveting central performance. Read full review

Fresh sounds like another slice of low-life, a study of an intelligent but fatally disadvantaged ghetto child's inexorable descent into criminality. But if the situations are (at first) familiar, the characters aren't; they may look like the same old junkies and dealers and whores and gangsters, but first-time director Boaz Yakin invests all of them--particularly Fresh (Sean Nelson)--with a subtle, complex life that's both painful and exhilarating. Read full review

It takes a bit to get going, but once it does, Fresh never lets up. Read full review

You may not buy the plot of this gripping little movie about a 12-year-old Brooklyn drug runner who finds a novel way of escaping the crack ghetto. Too much depends on timing, luck and the myopia of adults who fail to pay enough attention to the boy. But the picture is so beautifully designed and dynamically performed that you'll probably feel inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Read full review

Poised somewhere between a movie-familiar (i.e., semiscurrilous) look at inner-city life as trench warfare and a farfetched Hollywood revenge fantasy, this is kept alive largely through its first-rate performances, beginning with Sean Nelson's as the boy; Giancarlo Esposito is also a standout. Read full review

After a rich, anecdotal first half, Fresh, inspired by the lessons of his derelict-chess-whiz father (Samuel L. Jackson), ends up setting his own human chess game in motion. You may not believe a minute of it, though you won’t forget Nelson’s face. Read full review

This portrait of a childhood both incredibly resourceful and tragically deprived is memorable in an era of numerous outstanding preteen performances, and the final image of Fresh cracking, for the first time, from the cumulative pressure of his life is indelible. Performances are terrifically intense from top to bottom. Esposito is particularly riveting as the sinewy drug baron, and Ron Brice also scores as a rival dealer. Read full review

The movie's two instincts are at complete odds with each other. The first is to portray with compassion and understanding a young man of great gifts who is twisted by a cruel society into childhood's end. The second is to provide a rousing goose of vigilante justice more appropriate to the Death Wish films. How much better if Yakin had made up his mind; the movie wouldn't feel so split. Read full review

The strength of the piece is that it realises which aspects of its genre have been seen too many times, always coming back to Nelson's blank but expressive stare as he watches terrible things the director doesn't need to shove in our faces. Read full review

As violent scene follows violent scene, it is possible to notice how phony even the film's painstakingly constructed macho dialogue starts to sound. And Fresh's willingness to use legitimate social problems as nothing more than an excuse for cheap thrills gets increasingly off-putting. Fresh and his father may be able to push those chess pieces around at breakneck speed, but audiences will want to be treated with more respect. Read full review

In dramatizing the rigours of the ghetto, Yakin stoops to hyperbolic plot devices that tend to erode the very empathy he's striving to create. Things are surely bad, but not that bad - unwittingly, he's demonizing people who deserve better, who are better. [02 Sep 1994]

Though well acted, and handsomely shot by veteran Adam Holender, Fresh sacrifices real emotion for thriller contrivances. It's a tourist's drive through inner-city hell. [05 Sep 1994, p.69]