Critic Reviews

An upbeat, thoroughly entertaining street film about an entertainment revolution in the depressed South Bronx, featuring break dancing, graffiti art and record mixing. A black and Puerto Rican version of Saturday Night Fever. [08 June 1984, p.12]

Designed for everybody who still hasn't had his or her fill of break dancing, or who doesn't yet understand that break dancing, rap singing and graffiti are legitimate expressions of the urban artistic impulse.

The music is electric on Beat Street, a good-natured, emotional movie, where morals are as sound as they were in the mom's-in-the-kitchen, dad's-in-insurance sitcoms of the '50s and '60s.

Pretty bland, but you have to admit co-producer Belafonte had an eye for talent, spotlighting HipHop legends-in-the-making Afrika Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force, the Rock Steady Crew, and Grand Master Melle Mel and The Furious Five.

This energetic hip-hop musical barely supplements the large-scale musical numbers with its cliched plot, but it does capture a sense of the break-dancing craze and is more entertaining than most of the films made to cash in on that trend.