Of the readily available (ie: hiding in your local DVD store) films about hip hop, the best ones are usually documentaries. Tupac: Resurrection was Oscar-nominated and did very well for itself at the US box-office. Biggie & Tupac (documentary by Nick Broomfield - who also did one on Kurt Cobain) supposedly led to the case on Biggie's death being re-opened. Dave Chapelle teamed up with brilliant French director Michel Gondry to revisit the older forms of hip hop in Dave Chapelle's Block Party. Chapelle does a great job of talking to the regular folk in Brooklyn, getting a street-level perspective on the way that New York's changed in the past few decades.

In terms of feature films, one of the better efforts is the Eminem vehicle, 8 Mile. Audience assumptions about drive-by shootings and feuding rap groups are challenged throughout the picture. In one scene, a car of hoons approaches loaded with weapons, but they spray a hail of paintball pellets instead of bullets. His pal 50 Cent tried to achieve similar things with his biopic Get Rich or Die Tryin' a few years later, but he lacked the necessary screen presence to pull it off.

Read on for more on the latest hip hop film, Notorious...