Higher Learning is a film, like a couple of other 90's ones, I wish I had seen many years earlier. At first, you wonder where the story's going, but the more it progresses, you begin to see there's something special going on here, where Singleton had made something more than a movie here. What we have are a collection of characters, collegiate students, with their own drama's, and cuttingly real life problems, which of course might seem very cliché'd, but it's how the characters react off each other, especially when again, it's racial conflict, in a movie which again pits black against whites, some of it done discreetly. The two standout performances are that of sick loner student, Rappaport, studying engineering, who has some really bad wiring, and when a Nazi militant group befriend him, they send him down a real killer path. The other great performance is that of Fishburne, as a kind of smug, African literature teacher, who tells it like it is. His character was bl..dy interesting, not stereotypical. Of course, there are predictabilite's in the film, like one outcome, you'll see miles off, but the intent of the film is there, with a few beneficial messages, where you as the viewer, will do some learning yourselves. Not many films are like this, and Singleton has made a film, which has sadly, been heavily and unjustly criticized, yet though, it stands apart from his others. It's a shame, more viewers can't see the real beauty and special self to this powerful drama, with some powerful performances, no more than that of the scary Rappaport.

This was a good movie. I don't understand the reviews that it was skewed in its portrayals of whites as the villains and the blacks as the downtrodden victims who just won't take anymore. I personally think that it was very balanced in that area. There were stupid white people and stupid black people. What I would think is the most skewed is it's portrayal of the men as the villains and the women as the angelic do gooders. I think it ignored the fact that women can be just as awful, but tend not to be as outwardly violent, but I guess you can't have it all in one movie or else it would have been like 5 hours long. It showed Remmy's decent in a sympathetic light and in Fudge we saw that entitlement thinking in the black mentality is just as harmful as it is in the white mentality. Ultimately the only difference I saw in the white supremacist group and in Fudge's group was their skin color. Black or white, they were ALL red- blooded, self-entitled, American idiots. I thought that point was brilliantly made in the movie.

I won't argue with the fact that this is a great movie about racial tension, but I will argue with the fact that the Black Panthers are portrayed as better or more sympathetically than the Skinheads. Anyone that argues different is a victim of a false liberal bias. The fact is, for those of you who watch Higher Learning with an open mind to the facts of life, both sides of the conflict are portrayed as equally repugnant. Higher Learning makes a serious effort to take no sides in its portrayal of racism in America and it is an effort that pays off in spades. It is a solid piece of honest cinema and one with a valid point. Although, the film could have done without a half-hearted homage to the UT Austin tragedy. A movie of this caliber should have had a more original ending.

For some reason I thought this was going to be a goofy college movie but it isn't at all. It truly is an ensemble cast with no clear "main character", because the stories involved all of them.Omar Epps is Malik, at college on a partial scholarship as a track athlete. He has a giant chip on his shoulder and has trouble adjusting.Kristy Swanson is the freshman away from home, Kristen Connor, and needing to learn much to cope with this new college life.Michael Rapaport is Remy from Idaho, lonely and easily influenced, and gets pulled into a group of white supremacist skinheads.Jennifer Connelly is Taryn, borderline lesbian and one that identifies with "causes."My favorite is Laurence Fishburne as Political Science Professor Maurice Phipps, very "Morpheus-like" before he became Morpheus in "The Matrix". It was funny hearing him talk to students about "the real world", a term we hear so often in "The Matrix." But in a good way.Among the others in the cast were Ice Cube, Tyra Banks, Cole Hauser, Regina King, and Busta Rhymes.This is not a delicate movie. It has date rape, ethnic struggles, murder, and suicide. But it is a movie that holds your attention.MAJOR SPOILER: This is the movie where Rapaport as Remy wants to be accepted by his skinhead friends and, egged on, he gets a rifle and decides to snipe from a roof top and kill a black person. He ends up killing two students, one of them the girlfriend (Tyra Banks) of Malik. Later, cornered, Remy puts a pistol in his mouth and kills himself.