This three-hour-and-twenty-one-minute movie has no reason to be that long other than by the kind of thinking that equates size with significance. Director Spike Lee himself has suggested that his abecedarian "biopic" is in the vein of a David Lean epic, but the only similarity you are apt to be …
Spike Lee, redundantly setting the record straight about black participation in the Second World War, flatters himself on doing what Glory did for the Civil War, although without the inherent significance. The racial issues here feel tacked-on rather than built-in. Even so, if setting the record straight were an artistic …
For all Spike Lee's unflagging efforts to assert himself as a director -- not a "black director," a just plain director, and not really a just plain director either, but a very fancy director -- his chief claim on our attention remains the ease and comfort with which he moves …
Spike Lee's remake of Chan-wook Park's celebrated tale of a man who is mysteriously imprisoned and then just as mysteriously released has plenty of spattered brain matter and sadistic gut-punches. What it lacks is the original's creepy heart. The villain of this piece needs to be Lecter-level compelling: rarely seen, …
Sharlto Copley (District 9), so disappointing in Spike Lee's Oldboy, attempts to revive his career with this horror thriller about a man who wakes up in an open grave full of bodies and can't quite remember what happened.
A grim-and-grimmer urban horror story, from a novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., about four drug dependents en route (in a final flurry of cross-cutting) to neatly synchronized rack and ruin. The downward spiral of your dime-a-dozen junkie needs more than new extremes of physical disgustingness -- the gangrene, the two-way …
A Spike Lee comedy (or "a Spike Lee joint," as he would have it) about life at a black Southern college: fraternities, football, student protests, everything. Certainly a step in some direction from She's Gotta Have It, with a bigger budget, full color, and a "major Hollywood studio" behind it. …
From Spike Lee, two movies in one, the first concerned with a whistle-blower who exposes insider trading, among other malpractices, at a major pharmaceutical company (experimenting on an anti-AIDS pill, for added combustibility), and the second concerned with an interactive sperm donor for a virtual Rainbow Coalition of maternalistic lesbians …
Spike Lee's comedy about three very different men in love with the same woman. All of them are black (one of them is Spike Lee himself), though you scarcely notice it. The movie is miraculously successful at shedding color-consciousness, dodging stereotypes, and the like. With that out of the way, …
From producer Oprah Winfrey, comes this insightful and celebratory documentary about screen legend, director, and civil rights activist, Sidney Poitier. Directed by Reginald Hudlin, featuring candid interviews with Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Robert Redford, Lenny Kravitz, Barbra Streisand, Spike Lee and many more, the film is also produced by Derik …
Spike Lee takes a wrong-end-of-the-telescope view of the Son-of-Sam murder spree during a New York City heat wave in 1977: the events in little. (In his introductory and closing remarks, newspaperman Jimmy Breslin witlessly parrots the catch phrase of TV's Naked City: "There are eight million stories in the Naked …