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Fight the Power: Spike Lee’s Films Ranked

Artists understand violence as a transmission of energy that’s repulsive yet hypnotic.

Fight the Power: Spike Lee's Films Ranked
Photo: Focus Features

Artists, as opposed to sensationalist technicians, understand violence as a transmission of energy that’s repulsive yet hypnotic. There’s a reason people slow down to watch highway accidents and street brawls, or reliably patronize gory blockbusters and TV series. No contemporary American filmmaker grasps—or channels—this conflict of the rational (moral judgment, or superior pretense thereof) and the irrational (fearful animal urge to get off on annihilation) more vividly than Spike Lee, who’s in the midst of a fertile creative cycle that began with 2012’s Red Hook Summer.

Now working with lower budgets, Lee has refined his aesthetic into a kind of hothouse poetry of compacted excess. His cinema is presently a series of contrasts and frictions: between large and small scale (the latter often symbolizing the former), and reverent and irreverent tones. The chief ambiguity of the filmmaker’s work, though, is his attitude toward violence, and its intermingling with the sexual tension existing between the over-charged men and manipulative women that populate his cinema.

On the occasion of the release of Lee’s new joint, Da 5 Bloods, which is being released in the midst the largest civil unrest in America since the protests of 1968 and benefits from this wrenchingly serendipitous timing, we look back at the filmmaker’s feature-length theatrical releases. Chuck Bowen


She Hate Me

28. She Hate Me (2004)

She Hate Me begins with a montage of dead presidents capped with a shot of a three-dollar bill that links George W. Bush to the Enron scandal. This “all about the Benjamins” sequence sets up what begins as a promising critique of our greed-driven corporate culture. Spike Lee contrasts corporate and familial responsibility, and though he doesn’t seem to see a difference between what happens in the workspace and what happens in the bedroom, his barely articulate theories are undermined by his laughable notion of what lesbians want and how they want it. Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie), a rich brother working for a firm that’s on the brink of releasing an AIDS vaccine, becomes a whistleblower after stumbling upon evidence of financial malfeasance. His higher-ups then turn on him, and once Jack’s bank account is frozen, the film transforms into a whack-off fantasy in which every lesbian in the world wants to get some of Jack’s “man milk.” Most contracts are negotiated with John Hancocks, but in She Hate Me, deals are sealed with hot lesbian action. Ed Gonzalez


Girl 6

27. Girl 6 (1996)

Spike Lee is plain out of his element here, and it’s no wonder he falls back on stunt casting (from a post-Erotica Madonna as the boss of an illicit “no rules” phone sex ring, to Quentin Tarantino as, well, his own questionable self) and a ceaseless handpicked playlist of his favorite Prince songs. Girl 6, the story of a girl and her stint in the phone-sex biz, is a sloppy and problematic film, no diggity. But the opening audition scene and its thematic reprise at the film’s end aren’t among its mistakes. Actually, they’re among the film’s only signs of cognitively dissonant, Godardian life. Girl 6’s screenplay was written by a woman, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Theresa Randle’s disrobe-under-duress is, in actuality, Parks’s own built-in reminder to everyone who’s actually telling the tale. Tarantino and Lee aren’t so stylistically exclusive that most wouldn’t recognize the former’s obvious function as a stand-in. (Only the racial difference between them confuses the metaphor.) So, what Parks demonstrates by forcing Lee to force Randle into the dressing-down room is exactly what QT says: “It’s what the role requires.” Or rather, it’s what every current role for young black women requires. Eric Henderson

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Miracle at St. Anna

26. Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

A dollop of Saving Private Ryan, a dash of Letters from Iwo Jima, and a sprinkle of Italian neorealism characterize the style and sentiment of Miracle at St. Anna, a generally ludicrous and—at 160 minutes—punishing saga meant to be Spike Lee’s bid to memorialize the heroism of African-American soldiers during WWII. While Lee’s joints often benefit from excellent performances from first-rate actors and clever visual design, these positives are often overwhelmed by an over-the-top narrative style that works to kill the inherent intelligence and poignancy of the material. The film is strewn with betrayals—sexual, political, familial and otherwise—all the way to the requisite, Saving Private Ryan-like gun-battle climax, in which soldiers try to evacuate the village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema as Germans storm in. Amid the obligatory pell-mell of screaming and gunfire, Lee wedges in a seemingly miraculous intervention—call it deus ex machina or Hollywood contrivance—on which the whole of this production hinges. For every decently observed scene, there are a dozen dull, asinine ones to be endured, awash in over-orchestration and silly visual choices. Jay Antani


Oldboy

25. Oldboy (2013)

It’s difficult to see any real precedent for this kind of pulpy material in Spike Lee’s prior work, and it’s perhaps as a result that he’s at his most anonymized and restrained here, plugging along in hired-gun mode. Josh Brolin floating along atop the dolly for a few short seconds acts as one of the few instances of self-reference, which is odd for a director who usually packs his films with as many signature touches as possible. Working off Mark Protosevich’s script, Lee does push up one interesting angle, flirting with a post-9/11 parable in the style of Steven Spielberg’s Munich, but the metaphorical implications of a man whipped into a frenzy by his thirst for revenge are undercut by the restorative properties of a too-neat conclusion. Where Park Chan-wook’s original imagined the wronged sibling taking revenge on the protagonist as a buttoned-down maniac mogul, the villain here takes the form of an obscenely wealthy, mustache-twirling British blue-blood (a tedious Sharlto Copley), a choice that, combined with some other absurd touches, pushes the last act into full-tilt farce. In this and other instances, Oldboy seems to be responding to the sillier qualities of its source material by ramping up the ridiculousness, adding heightened violence to spice up the broth. Jesse Cataldo


Pass Over

24. Pass Over (2018)

Where many filmed plays attempt to “open up” their source material, Pass Over doubles down on its theatricality. The film was shot at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, and filmmaker Spike Lee worked in close collaboration with stage director Danya Taymor, sporadically wedding theatrical restrictions with cinematic compositions. With a few notable exceptions, the film is set on the Steppenwolf’s stage, which has been abstractly dressed to resemble an austere Chicago city block. Audiences may wish, however, that the mediums of theater and cinema had been more playfully merged, as Pass Over can use all the variety it can muster. Based on a play by Antoinette Nwandu, the film is concerned with restriction, which Lee and Taymor embrace with a purity of intent that’s remarkable and actively stifling. Bowen


Inside Man

23. Inside Man (2006)

Inside Man is so thoroughly crammed with symbolic undertones that virtually everything contains allegorical culture-clash potential. For instance, is there some hidden meaning behind Dalton Russell’s (Clive Owen) thieves entering the Wall Street bank in white painter’s outfits, but then changing into gray jumpsuits later on? And what does it say about Denzel Washington’s persecuted detective Frazier Keith that he ultimately, triumphantly, dons a dapper cream-colored suit? In Dalton’s forcing his prisoners to wear matching, identity-negating outfits, Lee seems to be critiquing racial profiling by challenging Washington’s hero to distinguish criminals from innocents without the benefit of knowing his suspects’ skin color. Yet despite its leads enthusiastically breathing life into their sub-Sidney Lumet characters, the languid Inside Man offers few insights into modern societal discord and provides only scant cops-and-robbers kicks. Perhaps not Lee’s dullest joint, it’s nonetheless one of his most sloppily rolled. Nick Schager

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Mo’ Better Blues

22. Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Spike Lee’s tribute to jazz may not stand shoulder to padded shoulder with Do the Right Thing, but it represents cinematographer Ernest Dickerson’s masterpiece. The visuals give you life through a jazzman’s night-owl eyes, starting with an opening credits sequence that bathes a solitary trumpet in a sumptuous, shiny metallic blue light. Dickerson’s vibrant reds also dominate his canvas and are synonymous with sin: It’s in the bright red light that bursts forth from the open door of the jazz club as a man is dragged out to be beaten in the street, and in the same red dress that both of Bleek Gilliam’s (Denzel Washington) women wear to a meeting at which they weren’t supposed to simultaneously appear. Dickerson treats those cool blues and hot reds like the proverbial angel and devil on the characters’ shoulders. If only Lee had trusted these images more, instead of bogging them down with clunky dialogue and exposition. Because when he lets his directorial visions speak for themselves, the film’s flaws are temporarily forgiven. Odie Henderson


He Got Game

21. He Got Game (1998)

Considering Spike Lee’s courtside reactions at Knicks games, He Got Game’s fanatical regard for basketball is entirely believable. The film even has a savior named Jesus (former Milwaukee Buck Ray Allen), whose athletic prowess practically guarantees his ascension into the holy ranks of the NBA. Lee’s parable demands unshakable faith in the plotline that a warden (Ned Beatty) would spring Jesus’s estranged father, Jake (Denzel Washington), from jail so that he may convince Jesus to sign with the governor’s alma mater rather than turn pro straight out of high school. Jake has a week to make this happen while trying to re-establish a parental bond with his son. This plays out against a frantic quest by coaches and colleges for Jesus’s b-ball miracles, and Lee pulls no punches in showing the ruthlessness that accompanies billion-dollar sports organizations’ seduction of poor black kids with athletic promise, but that strength is undermined by the script’s reductive depiction of women: Jesus’s girlfriend (Rosario Dawson) is a manipulative, calculating gold digger and Milla Jovovich’s hooker with a heart of gold exists solely to provide Jake with some forbidden nookie. Washington gives Jake a hint of the meanness that would later fuel Training Day. His performance, along with Mayik Hassan Sayeed’s cinematography, help the film achieve a small form of grace. Odie Henderson


Passing Strange

20. Passing Strange (2009)

Every now and then, Spike Lee puts his talent and production team to work in the service of someone else’s vision, creating a film that’s more document than documentary. Passing Strange was conceived and written by musician Stew, né Mark Stewart, and his musical partner, Heidi Rodewald, both of whom also appear in the play and the film. Loosely based on Stew’s adolescence, it’s the story of a middle-class black kid (Daniel Breaker) who leaves Los Angeles for Europe to search for “the real.” And a big part of that search involves breaking free of the stereotypes and expectations he chafed under back home. Lee’s cameras are able to take us briefly backstage with the jazzed-up cast during intermission, and he encouraged the actors to do an ecstatic reprise of “It’s All Right Now,” a song sung earlier in the play, at the finale. Watching the cast members bounce off of and embrace one another in those unscripted intervals adds another layer to the performance, letting us see something of what it meant to the actors themselves. But sometimes the camera feels intrusive, showcasing exaggerated, often bug-eyed expressions that look like mugging on camera but didn’t bother me at a distance. Elsewhere, the film is prone to cutting from one actor to another during high-energy group scenes rather than showing the group as a whole, chopping a portrait of widespread chaos or abandon into a series of individual shots. Still, Lee and his collaborators did the play proud, honoring its structure and rhythms. Elise Nakhnikian


Da 5 Bloods

19. Da 5 Bloods (2020))

Through pop-cultural references, Da 5 Bloods makes us privy to how war is committed and then sold back to us as an often exclusionary fantasy—a double dip of atrocity. Yet Spike Lee also indulges in his penchant for sensualist debauchery, which is tinged with moral and political irony. The main characters may voice many of his talking points, but they also enjoy getting loaded and dancing to their old-school songs in a country they once invaded—a potential hypocrisy that’s hauntingly acknowledged when North Vietnamese veterans buy them a drink in a gesture that’s smirking and pitying. The Vietnamese here casually view the Americans as unwitting instruments of something vast, ludicrous, and monstrous—and this quality, along with the Lee’s rapturous foregrounding of black characters in a war genre dominated by white men, makes Da 5 Bloods well worth contending with. But as the film progresses, it’s hard to distinguish irony from fealty to formula. In Chi-Raq and BlackKklansman, the pulp and political elements were intrinsically wedded, feeding one another, while Da 5 Bloods settles into an anecdotal “either/or” structure in which important historical facts alternate with clichés. And lost in its bombast is the kind of story about its main characters’ lives that could’ve affirmed Lee’s critique of America. At its best, the film offers a damning, impassioned, hallucinatory collage of images and ideas concerning the relationship between racism and warfare. At its worst, it’s a vibrant mess. Bowen

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Summer of Sam

18. Summer of Sam (1999)

During the New York City blackout of 1977, Spike Lee shot footage that would become his student film Last Hustle in Brooklyn. Summer of Sam is set during that same year, but you won’t catch a whiff of nostalgia throughout the film’s running time. Lee inherently understands the gulf between black and white urban experience in 1977’s New York. Indeed, as the filmmaker snarkily states on screen, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz wasn’t shooting people of color during his killing spree, so blacks at the time felt that they had nothing to worry about. As such, Summer of Sam focuses on an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx where people cuss, fight, and screw while taking in the skeevier elements of a still-bankrupt New York. The characters’ panic roils through all of their vibrant personal interactions, which are haphazardly rendered in the wildly tone-shifting vignettes of the script by Lee, Victor Collicchio, and Michael Imperioli. With Brody’s punk character, Lee cannily taps into his familiar theme of the fear of the other and its repercussions. The director also milks a ’70s-movie vibe here, which greatly contributes to his gritty and dark mise-en-scène. Gaudy and imperfect, with scenes of graphic violence uneasily existing alongside broad ethnic comedy, Summer of Sam is one of Lee’s biggest, and most interesting, hot messes. Odie Henderson


25th Hour

17. 25th Hour (2002)

Feelings of anger, guilt, blame and responsibility rage like a tempest through Spike Lee’s 25th Hour. In the way it turns specific moods and emotions into allegory, it’s almost the equivalent of Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising (one of the Boss’s songs even plays over the end credits), but Lee, who’s always fashioned his populist diatribes for a public that doesn’t exist, doesn’t focus his awareness into shared empathy like Springsteen did. United by his perpetual need to inflame any debate into a full-fledged argument, the various elements of 25th Hour are invariably provocative. But the husk of the story isn’t up to the filmmakers’ challenge; it’s apparent in nearly every scene that the film is a routine moral drama with the tragic 9/11 template superimposed, and while Lee and screenwriter David Benioff have connected the two diverging threads masterfully, the original material isn’t able to handle its share of the load. Still, watching Lee throw everything on his mind into the fray, no matter how irreconcilable with the story, makes for an undeniably fascinating experience. Perhaps more impressive than the moment where Monty (Edward Norton), while glaring at himself in a bathroom mirror, verbally lambastes the various cultural faces of New York City only to wonder if he should be directing the hostility at himself, is the sequence that depicts Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) slipping in his determination not to take a bite of the forbidden fruit held by his student during a drunken nightclub encounter. Masterfully constructed so that each shot has both visual flair and deeper meaning, it’s the kind of scene that, like so many in 25th Hour, could easily be presented as a stand-alone short. Chuck Rudolph


Red Hook Summer

16. Red Hook Summer (2012)

After the bloated and disjointed WWII epic Miracle of St. Anna, Spike Lee returns home to the present-day New York City borough of his youth with Red Hook Summer, the director’s fifth entry in his ongoing chronicles of “the Republic of Brooklyn.” A coming-of-age story at heart, the film follows a middle-class Georgia boy named Flick (Jules Brown) who’s forced to spend his summer vacation in the sweltering-hot Red Hook housing projects with his devout Methodist grandfather, Da Good Bishop Enoch Rouse (Clarke Peters). It’s a seemingly straightforward fish-out-of-water scenario, one wrought with miscommunication, generational conflicts, and class division. But Lee complicates this familiar formula by playing against our expectations in regard to character motivation and tone, revealing dark truths beneath the routines of everyday life. Glenn Heath Jr.


The Original Kings of Comedy

15. The Original Kings of Comedy (2000)

Shot over two nights in Charlotte, North Carolina, this filmed record of the Original Kings of Comedy Tour showcased Spike Lee’s heretofore untapped talent for directing live performances and events. Lee seems to have lucked out here, capturing four of the biggest African-American comedians at the height of their stand-up game. The now-ubiquitous Steve Harvey serves as master of ceremonies, getting in his comedic bits before ceding control to Cedric the Entertainer, D.L. Hughley, and the late Bernie Mac. Lee feeds off the energy in the room, calibrating his camera movements, shots, and edits to correspond with the different intensity levels of his hilarious performers. The camera seems to be everywhere, yet Lee never draws attention to himself. He knows the show belongs to his comedians, so he aids and abets from the shadows like the best of accomplices. The result is the Stop Making Sense of stand-up comedy movies. Odie Henderson

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Clockers

14. Clockers (1995)

Spike Lee’s opening credits sequences set the tone of his films, so the harrowing crime-scene photos that kick off Clockers offer fair warning that the viewer will not be coddled at any point. Despite their slight desaturation of color, this violent imagery packs a nauseous, horrific punch. The film that follows is no different, with its scenes of intense, graphic violence and gunplay. Adapting his own novel, Richard Price gives Lee the story upon which to hang his Scorsese homage, with Scorsese himself overseeing production. Lee coaxes outstanding turns from his actors, especially Harvey Keitel, Regina Taylor, and Delroy Lindo. Keitel is stoic yet menacing as the cop investigating a murder he thinks a low-level drug dealer named Strike (Mekhi Pfieffer) has committed. Taylor is fiercely maternal as Iris, fearlessly battering Strike in an attempt to keep her son from being influenced by him. And Lindo, on his third tour of duty with Lee, turns in a ferocious, spoiled-child performance as Rodney, Strike’s boss and a man who should never be disrespected. The ending is a total cop-out, but Lee’s desire for some glimmer of hope to end on feels like an act of mercy. Odie Henderson


Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

13. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)

Marked by an amazingly restless frenetic energy, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus appears to represent the self-implicating gesture of a rich and successful artist who has, perhaps autobiographically, chosen to remake a film that’s famously about the assimilation of African-Americans into white upper-echelon society. This film is a parable of the parasitic divide between the haves and the have-nots, between men and women, between blacks and whites. It’s also about the loneliness and the social estrangement that characterizes life on any portion of this wide variety of social spectrums, uniting us, though it’s just as knowingly occupied with the cathartic pleasure of the rarefied life that’s enabled by mass suffering. Bowen


4 Little Girls

12. 4 Little Girls (1997)

4 Little Girls has the most explicit tie to BlacKkKlansman of any of Spike’s features, not just for their shared engagement with the racial terror committed by the Ku Klux Klan, but also for their mutal understanding that a not insignificant number of Americans are still beholden to, and enamored of, the atrocious beliefs espoused by the KKK. One need not ask what would happen today if a white supremacist murdered black people in a church, or whether racists would get preferential treatment by prominent politicians; just turn on the television to find out. The film pays tribute to Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair, who were murdered when Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in 1963. This was a major flashpoint in the civil rights movement, but Lee’s focus is on giving four little girls back the humanity that was taken from them by a maelstrom of hatred. Lee also scores a major coup in an interview with George Wallace, a scene that, for the way the former governor of Alabama drags his black nurse on screen to show how “progressive” he’s become, recalls the absurdist, pitch-black humor of BlacKkKlansman. Odie Henderson


Get on the Bus

11. Get on the Bus (1996)

Contrary to entrenched societal belief and decades of Hollywood misrepresentation, black people aren’t monolithic. We are not of one mind. And that is the point of Get on the Bus. Reggie Bythewood’s episodic screenplay follows a group of men traveling to the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., and while the plot puts a timestamp on the film, the characters’ viewpoints remain blazingly current. This is one of the most diverse depictions of the black male experience in America ever put on screen. Get on the Bus gives each character time to express their thoughts. The film doesn’t seek to paint any of these men as a saint. Rather, it proceeds as a feature-length discussion—an exploration of what can be achieved just by listening. Lee gets a veritable Murderer’s Row of actors who know how to compellingly talk—Charles S. Dutton, Ossie Davis, Andre Braugher—and his appropriate direction is uncharacteristically low-key. At least until the end, as Get on the Bus builds to a final shot of a broken shackle, a blatant but effectively symbolic representation of deliverance from the bondage of cinematic stereotypes. Odie Henderson

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Crooklyn

10. Crooklyn (1994)

Spike Lee’s nostalgic reminiscence is like childhood itself: messy, unstructured, and saved from spiraling into total chaos by its parent characters (Alfre Woodard and Delroy Lindo). Crooklyn is haunted by the ghosts of worry-free playtime, lost innocence, and the random details that remain stuck in memory until one is old enough to process them correctly. Written by Lee and two of his siblings, Joie and Cinqué Lee, the film feels like a family conversation where stories from the past are recalled and disputed. Crooklyn’s point of view reflects how foreign it must feel to be the only daughter (Zelda Harris) in a house full of sons or, in the case of one lengthy sequence shot through an anamorphic lens, what it’s like to be a city dweller visiting rural parts unknown. The film is also a mournful paean to the concept of a well-lived-in neighborhood, one where kids could whittle away time by simply being young and out on the stoop. Odie Henderson


When the Levees Broke

9. When the Levees Broke (2006)

Throughout When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee foregoes useless speechifying, opting instead to create an epic document of New Orleans’s struggle both during and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that should prove instructive for years to come, if not in facts than for its emotional scope: an up-close, deeply empathetic and soulful journey through the stories that make up this catastrophe. The film works because Lee turns away from himself, and taps into the unvarnished pain of Gulf Coast residents, who understandably channel their frustrations toward a government that neglected them and whose aid continues to fumble. Sometimes it’s less about what President Bush or FEMA could’ve done (answer: a lot more) than the sentiment they send to the citizens they represent; Bush enjoys vacation and Condoleezza Rice shops for shoes while thousands drown in their homes. This attention to politicians’ behavior can get hackneyed—“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” is repeated three times, when it’s already been overdone—but the documentary always remains focused on the people affected by officials’ thoughtlessness. Paul Schrodt


Jungle Fever

8. Jungle Fever (1991)

The interracial love story between Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra’s characters that anchors Jungle Fever is the least interesting element of this 1991 joint. While Spike Lee is game for a surface-level exploration of the trials and tribulations of forbidden love, his once-controversial subject matter is merely a selling point designed to get asses into seats. Once he hooks us with the promise of sin, he pivots his social commentary to a tragic secondary character, just as Douglas Sirk did in Imitation of Life. This is appropriate, because Jungle Fever is the equivalent of a 1950s message picture. Expertly wielding his influences, Lee throws a dash of Delbert Mann and a soupcon of Stanley Kramer into the proceedings. Today, the film plays as an entertaining piece of Spike Lee cross-referencing. Watching it, one can see the origins of some of his late-career directorial and screenwriting trademarks, and the perfection of those he employed early on. Odie Henderson


BlacKkKlansman

7. BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Spike Lee’s film registers an awareness for the narcotic qualities of cinema, particularly films that address matters of race, and as BlacKkKlansman distractedly flits between set pieces that catch Klansman in their comic crosshairs and fiery speeches of protest among Black Power activists, it takes care to lay charges along these fault lines, slow-burning to a potentially seismic collision of two discrete worlds. But the plot of BlacKkKlansman never quite gets its Do the Right Thing moment—maybe because Lee is even less optimistic today than he was in 1989 about America’s prospects of working things out and confronting its racial differences. That makes BlacKkKlansman a potently unresolved vision—hence a final montage sequence that includes footage from last year’s deadly riots in Charlottesville. Sam C. Mac

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School Daze

6. School Daze (1988)

Widely criticized as one of the more egregious examples of Spike Lee’s spin-painting approach to telling stories, School Daze is, if nothing else, a compelling time capsule of racial politics in the late 1980s, ethnographically sealed off in a hothouse micro-environment (an all-black college campus) that’s as constrictive as Lee’s varying plot threads and stylistic whims are profuse. Lee has always been an extraordinarily musical-influenced filmmaker, and many of his most famous set pieces have been as much edited and propelled by their musical thrust as by their narrative or thematic impact. Big Daddy Love’s roll call in Do the Right Thing, Flipper’s visit to the crack house in Jungle Fever, and even the cadences of Monty’s litany against every social subsection at the center of 25th Hour all ebb and flow like verse and chorus of a showstopping musical centerpiece. School Daze one-ups them all with a cornucopia of different musical montages, including one (“Straight and Nappy”) that sends up the Broadway-influenced tenet of having musical numbers act as an extension of the characters’ subconscious thoughts. The film isn’t going to convert anyone who considers Lee a filmmaker whose ambitions exceed his grasp, but for those who savor their arguments loose and full of tangents, it’s as rich in rewards as other second-gear Lee films. Eric Henderson


She’s Gotta Have It

5. She’s Gotta Have It (1986)

Spike Lee’s first feature was one of the lynchpins of the burgeoning American indie movement of the 1980s, but don’t hold that against it. Unlike the seemingly endless torrent of films tailor-made to cater to specialty divisions, Lee’s early work spoke on behalf of the black experience without just speaking to blacks alone. Stylistically, these films were as cheekily dialectical from the get-go as would later be celebrated in Do the Right Thing. As in that particular masterpiece, She’s Gotta Have It’s characters talk into the camera, but they do so in service of a Rashomon-tinged postmortem on how an artistic young woman couldn’t make polyamory work in her favor. Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) is the independent woman in question, and the entire movie is a multi-P.O.V. flashback to when she spent Thanksgiving time-sharing her vagina between Jaime (Redmond Hicks), a sweet-natured but oppressively traditional-minded monogamist, Greer (John Canada Terrell), a hard-bodied, soft-headed male model on the cusp of taking his bikini briefs onto the cover of GQ, and Mars (Lee), a runty bicyclist deliveryman who hasn’t delivered a package in two years but knows how to make Nola laugh. Even if Nola’s urban enclave ends up too close for comfort, Lee’s first film statement conveys the communal experience that would elevate even some of his sketchier efforts. Eric Henderson


Malcolm X

4. Malcolm X (1992)

The elements of popular cinema found in Malcolm X speak to the fact that the film is utterly unique—you won’t find an equivalent film about Martin Luther King Jr. or Stokely Carmichael—and the struggle Spike Lee faced in arriving at this stage of his career. The script, written by Lee and Arnold Perl, which follows Malcolm (an invigorating, masterful Denzel Washington) from his days as a cartoonish skirt-chasing hood to an imprisoned intellectual and finally to the deeply conflicted spokesperson for the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammed (Al Freeman Jr.), unfolds in linear time with brief flashbacks to his family’s struggles while the brutal murder of his father (by the Black Legion). Also, the use of a star such as Washington surrounded by strong but relatively unknown supporting players—Delroy Lindo, Albert Hall, Kate Vernon, Lee himself, and, most prominently, Angela Bassett as Malcolm’s wife—gives the film breadth without breaking focus from the central protagonist. As a political film, Malcolm X is frustrating, but not for lack of good reason. The truth is that the film is preposterously close to balanced: White people are evenly portrayed as bigots or fools, but Malcolm’s statements on J.F.K.’s assassination not only make him an enemy with the white majority, but become the major separating factor between him and the Nation of Islam. Lee has done the remarkable and portrayed Malcolm X as a true individual, not without a certain sense of hagiography. As a film that shows the American civil rights movement as a struggle powered and enlivened almost completely by brave and brilliant African-American leaders, Malcolm X remains an irrefutable revelation. Chris Cabin


Bamboozled

3. Bamboozled (2000)

At the time of Bamboozled’s release, white liberal critics seemed perturbed that Spike Lee largely avoided such easy targets as wealthy media executives, instead attacking respectability politics, via the character of Delacroix, and white liberals themselves, via Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport), a Tarantino-esque figure who believes his engagement with black culture exonerates him from charges of racism. We like to imagine that America has “come so far,” but, as Ashley Clark shows in Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, the radical core of the film is “its steadfast rejection of a soothing narrative of progress in American entertainment and wider society.” Bamboozled is muddled at times and frequently lacking in self-criticism, but Lee’s aesthetic and satirical choices have been too easily dismissed as simply shoddy filmmaking. The film’s muddy digital look—a frequent sticking point for viewers—provides an ironic contrast to the clarity of the New Millennium Minstrel Show segments. Filmed in bright, color-saturated Super 16mm, the minstrel show itself provides an almost soothing counterpoint to the murky DV of the rest of Bamboozled, just as the stereotypes of minstrelsy offer an easily comprehensible understanding of race that the real world, with all its complexities, forbids. Keith Watson

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Chi-Raq

2. Chi-Raq (2015)

Chi-Raq, Spike Lee’s most daring film since Bamboozled, is a liberal message movie staged as a fusion of graphic novel, music video, musical, action film, meathead comedy, August Wilson play, and chamber sex drama—all under the umbrella of contemporizing Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, an ancient Greek comedy that pivots on women withholding sex from men in an attempt to instill peace in their land. A fleeting paraphrasing of Walter Hill’s The Warriors late in the film isn’t incidental either, as Lee is courting and achieving precisely that sort of heightened, formally amazing, morally destabilizing force. Lee’s empathy and prodigious command of the dozen or so tones and formal devices that he’s juggling imbue the film’s more traditionally cautionary moments with a renewed ability to sting. One expects to see a mother weeping on the street in this sort of gangster film, but when Jennifer Hudson’s character scrubs her slain daughter’s blood off the asphalt, the grit of her fingernails audibly brushing the street, there’s a sense of chaos, of true, platitude-shattering violation. This scene doesn’t belong next to moments of high comedy or arousing sex-play. And that’s the point. Bowen


Do the Right Thing

1. Do the Right Thing (1989)

In his uncontestable masterpiece (indeed one of American cinema’s absolutely unimpeachable classics), Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee deftly follows the actions of two dozen people on what turns out to be one of the longest, hottest, most memorable and maybe most tragic days of their lives. And he does it without so much as a single lugubrious or extraneous moment. Even before Bed-Stuy’s race relations unravel in the heat, Lee’s film strives for insistent political consciousness, which is to say he doesn’t just bring up political topics but dares to actually take positions. Some reviewers, largely the same nervous nellies who warned the film might incite race riots, took issue with Lee’s perceived free pass to eschew political correctness, especially in Bush I’s “kinder, gentler nation.” But that’s precisely the point of Do the Right Thing. It takes political concepts away from the lip service of cloistered authority figures (including the film’s dirty cops) and dissects them through the lives of those who are forced to live by them. In this context, the radio DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy’s stately, nearly two-and-a-half-minute roll call of great black musicians carries as much weight of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lee’s deceptively vibrant pop comedy (“Fuck Frank Sinatra!” “Fuck Michael Jackson!”) is both freewheeling and, as the film’s final half hour reveals, extraordinarily calculated. When tempers spiral out of control and grave injustice is meted out to one of Bed-Stuy’s inhabitants, the disruption is a direct slap to shake audiences out of complacency. Eric Henderson

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