![]() ![]() The best Spike Lee movies tend to have a strong focal point, often one of social commentary, for the director to hone in. Even at two-plus hours, Da 5 Bloods never lags, aided in part by Lee's playful camera ratios, which create a distinctive look throughout the eras. Lindo was absolutely robbed of an Oscar nomination, as he delivers one of the best performances ever found in a Lee film. "Directed by a filmmaker who remains in total control of his once-in-a-generation gifts and utilizes them to synthesize story and history into something new," says EW's A– review, Da 5 Bloods also holds a bittersweet note as Chadwick Boseman's final film released before his untimely death.ĭelroy Lindo stars as the leader of a group of Vietnam vets who, upon returning to the country to recover a stash of gold they buried 40 years ago, discover that the road to riches is anything but easy. Crooklyn as a whole also doesn't have the urgency or rhetoric of a typical Lee film, but its successes resonate through its universal themes of growing up, loss, and family.Ĭriminally overlooked during awards season (as is Lee's recurring reprimanding), this Vietnam-set film (his first for Netflix) is the director doing what he does best: mixing disparate elements like a war epic, buddy comedy, father-son drama, and social justice commentary into something powerful and of the moment. But for all its merits, there are some aspects that distance it from Lee's greatest works - one of which is his choice to film Troy's visits to her Southern family with an anamorphic lens to identify with the child's unease, and it still remains a controversial choice for how it left the visuals squeezed and gauzy. Co-written with two of his siblings (Joie and Cinqué), the movie explores the world of 9-year-old Troy ( Zelda Harris), who lives with her boisterous family in a Brooklyn neighborhood filled with an array of offbeat people and plenty of hard-to-swallow life lessons.Ĭrooklyn is very often a beautiful, intimate coming-of-age portrait of Blackness, specifically Black girlhood, and one where New York again is just as much a character as a living backdrop. Lee wistfully recalls his childhood in a simpler New York through Crooklyn, a semi-autobiographical film that marks the director's rare foray into PG-13 territory. Dutton, Ossie Davis, Bernie Mac, and Andre Braugher. But the strength of Get on the Bus lies in the observant screenplay by Reggie Rock Blythewood and the work of a talented cast, including Charles S. There aren't too many of Lee's stylistic flourishes thanks to it primarily taking place on a Greyhound bus (hence the title), and no appearance by Lee himself, being the first film he directs without making a cameo. It makes perfect sense then that Lee would seize the opportunity to chronicle the movement in his own unique style, with EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum noting, "Who better than America's leading Black filmmaker to spin the many knotty threads of that dramatic, emotional, provocative expression of male African American unity into a vibrant skein?" This film, released one year after the march, brings together 15 different Black men on their way to Washington, D.C., each with their own reason for attending the demonstration. The Million Man March was a critical event in the Black community, bringing men together from across the nation to "convey to the world a vastly different picture of the Black male" and advocate for themselves in the country's political epicenter. However, Lee was apparently unhappy with having to cut an hour out of his vision, with producers changing his closing credit to a "Spike Lee Film" instead of his signature "joint." To say any more would spoil the film's secrets - it's truly something you have to see for yourself. He molds himself into a figure ready for revenge, only to one day wake up completely free and tasked with finding out the reason he was captured in the first place. The twisty, tragic tale of revenge finds Brolin's character locked away for 20 years without any knowledge of why he's been imprisoned. ![]() ![]() ![]() And while there's no beating the source material, his film certainly has its pleasures, including a strong performance from Josh Brolin and Lee's direction, with EW's Owen Gleiberman declaring that "he's made the first American film that fully conjures the perverse, loco charge of a sadomasochistic Asian revenge drama." Several different parties circled around an American remake for years, but Lee signed on for the unenviable task. And they are almost impossible when it comes to a film with as much of a cult pedigree as South Korean director Park Chan-wook's 2003 stunner, Oldboy. ![]()
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