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When Quentin Tarantino<\/a>\u2018s \u201cPulp Fiction<\/a>\u201d exploded onto the world\u2019s movie screens in 1994, it became immediately and ubiquitously influential, inspiring dozens of similarly pitched cocktails of black comedy and violent crime: \u201c2 Days in the Valley,\u201d \u201cLock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,\u201d and \u201cLove and a .45\u201d are just a few obvious examples.<\/p>\n None of these movies, even the good ones, came close to equaling the entertainment value or literary qualities of Tarantino<\/a>\u2018s masterpiece, but their proliferation had a weird side effect: keeping critics and audiences from recognizing and appreciating the handful of post-\u201cPulp Fiction\u201d crime films that actually were<\/em> great.<\/p>\n More from IndieWire<\/strong><\/p>\n In the years following \u201cPulp Fiction,\u201d a kind of cinematic Gresham\u2019s Law set in, where there were so many movies featuring guys with guns on their posters that they became indistinguishable from one another. By the fall of 1997, when writer\/director Jim Kouf\u2019s \u201cGang Related\u201d came out, it was not only difficult to distinguish the film from the myriad other crime movies flooding the marketplace, it was difficult to distinguish it from other Tupac Shakur vehicles \u2014 the rapper was so prolific that \u201cGang Related\u201d was his third posthumously released movie to come out in the year following his murder.<\/p>\n \u201cGang Related\u201d was the last Shakur performance to make it to the screen, and one of the last gasps of several 1990s subgenres. Not only was it guilty by association with all the post-\u201cPulp Fiction\u201d Tarantino knockoffs; it also intersected with the 1990s explosion of \u201chood\u201d movies that came in the wake of John Singleton\u2019s \u201cBoyz N the Hood\u201d and The Hughes Brothers\u2019 \u201cMenace II Society,\u201d and played as a kind of dark inversion of the buddy cop movies that had been dominant since \u201cLethal Weapon\u201d in 1987.<\/p>\n A late entry in several traditions that audiences, and especially critics, had by this point had their fill of, \u201cGang Related\u201d debuted to minimal business and mixed reviews. Yet sometimes the late movies in a cycle can be among the best, because they\u2019re the ones most interested in and capable of truly examining, critiquing, and reinventing the cycle\u2019s conventions \u2014 \u201cRisky Business<\/a>\u201d appearing several years into the wave of \u201cPorky\u2019s\u201d-inspired teen sex comedies is perhaps the most obvious example. (Spike Lee\u2019s own hood movie, \u201cClockers<\/a>,\u201d is another.) \u201cGang Related\u201d is a case in point, and 28 years after its release, the virtues we took for granted then seem both obvious and vital.<\/p>\n