Hoop Dreams (1994)
KTCA Minneapolis, Kartemquin Films

Description

Two ordinary inner-city kids dare to dream the impossible - professional basketball glory - in this epic chronicle of hope and faith. Filmed over a five-year period, Hoop Dreams follows young Arthur Agee and William Gates as they navigate the complex, competitive world of scholastic athletics while striving to overcome the intense pressures of family life and the realities of their Chicago streets.

Tags

basketball, Chicago

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

A film like "Hoop Dreams" is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.
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10 Time | Richard Corliss

Hoop Dreams isn't mainly about sport, or even about life and death in the inner city. It's about families hanging tough on nerve and prayer. It's about what passes for the American dream to people whose daily lives are closer to nightmares.
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10 Variety | Todd McCarthy

A prodigious achievement that conveys the fabric of modern American life, aspirations and incidentally, sports, in close-up and at length, "Hoop Dreams" is a documentary slam dunk.
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10 efilmcritic.com | Rob Gonsalves

The documentary "Hoop Dreams" has the sprawling force of the best fiction. In fact, it's the closest movie equivalent to the great American novel I've seen in years.
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10 DVD Talk | Bill Gribon

Showing that, by carefully controlling your cinema vérité leanings, while also allowing the narrative to blossom naturally, the team of Steve James, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert became the authors on one of real life's greatest epics, one emotional basketball season at a time.
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10 digitallyobsessed.com | Jon Danziger

Hoop Dreams isn't just a great documentary; it's an extraordinary social document, a look at the big aspirations and thin hopes of those at a tremendous economic disadvantage in what should be the land of opportunity.
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10 PopMatters.com | Cynthia Fuchs

This remarkable, relentlessly compelling movie never shies away from its deep analysis of the professionalization of the game and college recruiting, but it also never lets go of the faith, energy, and desire embodied by Arthur and William.
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10 Entertainment Weekly | Owen Gleiberman

''Hoop Dreams'' is an astonishing emotional experience -- it has highs, lows, and everything in between -- but the film's devastating upshot is that if you're from the inner city and are living for your hoop dreams, either you're good enough to be another Isiah or you're plumb out of luck.
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10 Movie Vault | Aaron West

Hoop Dreams, despite its 3-hour running time and deep themes, is a flat-out exciting to watch.
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9.8 DVD Verdict | Patrick Bromley

I can admire its technical accomplishments and construction—it is, after all, beautifully crafted and executed—but my reactions are primarily emotional, and I'm left a bit lost for words. Hoop Dreams moved me in a way that few films do. I'm not sure I need to say much else.
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9.0 Amazon user reviews

This completely absorbing three-hour documentary follows the lives of two inner-city African American teenage basketball prodigies as they move through high school with long-shot dreams of the NBA, superstardom, and an escape from the ghetto.
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9.0 documentaryfilms.net | Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr.

Hoop Dreams is a complex film that deeply explores the hopes and pitfalls of inner-city life, leaving the viewer with a number of troubling questions about the future of thousands of young men like Arthur and William.
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8.0 DVD Town | Christopher Long

The film ultimately succeeds for one simple reason. William Gates and Arthur Agee are two of the most compelling lead characters you could possibly ask for, two likeable and flawed young men, who each pursued a dream with everything he had.
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8.0 DVD Journal | Clarence Beaks

... the filmmakers' compassion and humanity ultimately gets the better of them, and their narrative, directed by the mercurial whims of the universe, becomes a living, breathing Dickensian document of urban American life that may never be surpassed.
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8.0 Empire | Kim Newman

Easily outclassing the fiction films is this extraordinarily compelling near three-hour documentary, which follows a pair of black kids from Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project through four years of high school, examining the assumption that their basketball talent is a chance to get out of the ghetto and into college.
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