An easy movie to pick apart, but it lives, breathes and switches moods from humor to despair better than any American release this year.

Now Singleton, too, dares to take a hard look at his community. His characters are a little older, and he is older, too, and less forgiving.

Lacks the cumulative impact of "Boyz," since Singleton allows repetition and sermonizing to dull his theme about the infantilization of black males. But Baby Boy leaves you shaken.

Jody's story is told with so much heart -- and his character is acted with such a winning combination of playfulness, vulnerability and sexual dynamism by Mr. Gibson -- that you can forgive the occasionally incoherent storytelling, the overwrought moments and the haphazard, unconvincing excursions into dream and fantasy.

Sometimes gets repetitive and is slightly overlong. But it's got solid performances.

What holds the movie together, however, is Gibson's broodingly responsive performance.

Kicks off the Oedipus theme that gallops through the story.

A movie that will act like a smack in the face to some audiences, while others may simply laugh in recognition.

Raunchy, provocative and often very funny.

At once too neat and too messy, but films like this are too rare to leave it at that. Ragged but ambitious, it retains a core of genuine emotion -- this picture is doing the best it can, and although that may not be everything, it ought to count for something.

Superbly acted by everyone involved (Rhames does his best work since "Pulp Fiction"), the film is really more about character than plot, though frankly, at more than two hours, it could have used a bit more of the latter.

The characters are so full-bodied and the feelings so raw and complex that I'd call this the best thing he's (Singleton) done to date.

Rambling and conflicted as it is, it's one of the most entertaining African-American comedies of manners ever made.

It's a feel-good movie that happens to have a lot of feel-bad in it. The gratuitous violence sucks, and the pat conclusion prompts one to shout don't believe the hope!.