Pretentious, heart-on-sleeve New York movie pointedly set post-9/11: the blue beacons of light that stand where the Twin Towers once stood; the clean-up operations in the pit below the windows of one of the main characters; the Osama bin Laden wanted posters; the firefighter shrine at an Irish pub; the …
Spike Lee, in confrontational mode, serves up a new generation's Putney Swope, the blaxploitation-era satire by Robert Downey (Jr.'s father) about a black takeover of a Madison Avenue ad agency. The comparable premise here concerns a prissy Harvard-educated African-American TV executive (Damon Wayans), under pressure from his blacker-than-thou white boss …
Spike Lee opens with the money shot from Gone With the Wind (“a romance set in Auschwitz”), then jumps forward a few decades to a time where a black police officer was actually able to infiltrate the KKK. (Guys who wear pointy hoods don’t generally do so in order to …
Spike Lee offers the prospect of a couple of new angles of interest. First is the open acknowledgment of his debt to, or kinship with, Martin Scorsese, who co-produced the movie, and whose frequent actor Harvey Keitel has a leading role in it, and whose two-time scriptwriter Richard Price authored …
Spike Lee knows enough camera tricks to keep you glued to the screen. Though not necessarily with pleasure. The sequence here that most nearly approaches outright pain, in fact crosses well over the threshold of it, is the one that employs an anamorphic lens to compress the players into funhouse-mirror …
Spike Lee’s biggest accomplishment was assembling a cast of seasoned Hollywood veterans to bring to life his saga of four African-American survivors of the Vietnam War (and son) who reunite in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), ostensibly to track down the remains of their squadron leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman). …
Spike Lee voiced displeasure at being branded after his first film "the black Woody Allen," and in truth his ambitions, though no less large, run in a quite different direction (and at even a faster clip) than those of the maker of Interiors and September and such. Lee's third feature …
Spike Lee's first- anniversary commemoration of the (as it turned out) optimistically labelled Million Man March. It tells of one motley group of fifteen or so who travel together to Washington, D.C., aboard a chartered bus from South Central L.A., and conduct a sort of mobile open forum of views …
The old story of the unimagined detours on the dreamt-of road to stardom. This particular detour, into the phone-sex business where acting and fantasizing talents do not go to waste, gets the Spike Lee treatment. Which of course includes the director's trademark shot of the stationary actor pushed or pulled …
Spike Lee would appear to have been watching too much television. Or anyway, to have not yet settled on which of its dizzying array of styles he wants to emulate: athletic-shoe ad, music video, ESPN highlight reel, or issues-oriented Afterschool Special. This fidgety channel surfing will not be stabilized simply …
Unabashedly commercial enterprise from Spike Lee, a lightweight heist-and-hostage caper with a heavyweight cast: Clive Owen as the bank-job mastermind, Denzel Washington as the New York cop who catches the call, Jodie Foster as the smugly enigmatic free-lance troubleshooter with friends in high places ("My bite's much worse than my …
Impoverished view of impoverished life on the streets of Harlem. "Yo." "Wha's up?" "Tha's bullshit, man." "Fuck you, man." "What the fuck!" "You're fucked up, man." "Fuck that." "You better stop bullshittin' me." "Shut the fuck up." "What the fuck is wrong with you?" "Freeze, motherfucker!" "You crazy, man." Etc. …
Spike Lee's heated discussion of interracial romance is engaging enough on the level of a TV talk show (a girl-talk session of black women itemizing the shortcomings of black men could be transplanted bodily to The Oprah Winfrey Show), but not on the level of fiction. The most glaring problem …
From Sam Levinson (Another Happy Day, Assassination Nation) comes a cogent two-hander about Malcolm (John David Washington), a black filmmaker who — if what the white critics said after the premier of his first feature is true — stands on the cusp of greatness, and Marie (Zendaya), a girlfriend eager …