Ernest Dickerson's 'Juice' opens — Tupac Shakur's screen debut

Why it matters

Juice opened January 17, 1992. Ernest Dickerson, who had been Spike Lee's cinematographer on every Spike Lee film up to that point, directed his first feature. The film is about four Harlem teenagers (played by Omar Epps, Khalil Kain, Jermaine Hopkins, and a 20-year-old Tupac Shakur) who try to pull off a robbery and watch the friendship unravel after. The Tupac performance is the part you have to know about. Pac plays Bishop, a kid who turns on his friends after the robbery goes wrong. The performance is genuinely scary in a way most musician-actor performances are not, partly because Pac was already a magnetic-on-camera presence and partly because by 1992 he was already the kind of person who could embody that character without much acting. The film was a critical and commercial success. It is the role that established Pac as a real movie actor, not just a rapper trying movies, and it set up the next four years of his film career (Poetic Justice, Above the Rim, Gridlock'd, Gang Related). You should watch Juice if you have not in a while. The performance still works.