Spike Lee is something of a Cannes legend—a festival regular who was president of the jury in 2021 and returned this year with his latest high-octane romp, Highest 2 Lowest, a reunion with long-time collaborator Denzel Washington. Ahead of its arrival in theaters this week, we revisit the boundary-pushing auteur’s most impactful work to date, from the sun-soaked highs of Do the Right Thing to the devastating gut punch of Da 5 Bloods.
She’s Gotta Have It (1986)
Lee’s breakthrough came at the age of 29, with his raucous, ultra-low budget feature-length directorial debut: the zippy tale of a Brooklyn artist (Tracy Camilla Johns) struggling to choose between three lovers, which earned him Cannes’s Youth Prize for young directors as well as the Independent Spirit Award for best first feature. Some three decades later, he’d adapt it into a spirited, DeWanda Wise-led Netflix series of the same name, too.
Do the Right Thing (1989)
His exuberant follow-up, a fascinating sketch of Brooklyn race relations at the height of a summer heatwave, featuring Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Rosie Perez, Giancarlo Esposito, Samuel L. Jackson, and a pre-Severance John Turturro, was a total scorcher. It was in the running for the Palme d’Or, netted Lee his first Oscar nod, for best original screenplay, and remains his best and most beloved work.
Malcolm X (1992)
The civil rights icon, as embodied by a charismatic Denzel Washington, takes center stage in this searing biopic, which charts his rise from a turbulent childhood in the rural Midwest to his early life as a hustler, his incarceration, conversion to Islam, activism, and eventual assassination in extraordinary fashion. With Angela Bassett as Malcolm’s razor-sharp wife, and cameos from Nelson Mandela, political activist Al Sharpton, and Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale, it’s both a breathtaking ride and a genuine historical artifact.
Crooklyn (1994)
Another New York-set classic, this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age saga—co-written by Lee and his siblings—sees five boisterous kids run riot in a Brooklyn brownstone, as supervised by Alfre Woodard and Delroy Lindo as their beleaguered parents. Set in 1973, with a nostalgic soundtrack, cultural references, and Easter eggs to match, it’s a love letter to a forgotten era and a neighborhood that would never be the same again.
4 Little Girls (1997)
Lee’s second Oscar nod, this time for best documentary feature, was for this heart-wrenching examination of the murder of four African-American girls—Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Rosamond Robertson—in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing carried out by the KKK in Birmingham in 1963. With interviews, home movies, and archival footage, he stitches together a picture of the tragedy itself, the national outrage it provoked, the Civil Rights Act that was finally signed the following year, and how much (or little) has actually changed since then. Urgent, timely, harrowing.
Bamboozled (2000)
This pitch-black cult classic follows a Black TV executive (Damon Wayans) who finds himself in a stalemate with his white boss and realizes he can only escape his contract by getting fired. Cue his development, with the aid of a colleague (Jada Pinkett Smith), of an extremely offensive minstrel show that features Black actors in blackface—except it becomes a roaring success. A bruising satire in the vein of American Fiction (just much more brutal), it’s a hysterically funny and eye-opening watch.
25th Hour (2002)
A killer cast—Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rosario Dawson, Anna Paquin, Brian Cox—headlines this taut New York thriller, filmed in the aftermath of 9/11 and suffused with a deep sense of loss. It tracks the former as a mobster tying up loose ends ahead of a prison sentence, and is worth watching for our anti-hero’s impassioned into-the-mirror monologue alone—still one of the best rants in movie history.
BlacKkKlansman (2018)
After making his onscreen debut at eight as a Harlem schoolboy in Malcolm X, Denzel’s son John David Washington graduated to leading man in this madcap crime caper, which sees him as a detective hellbent on infiltrating and exposing the local KKK chapter in ’70s Colorado, opposite Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, and Corey Hawkins. It scooped the Grand Prix at Cannes, and then finally secured Lee his first-ever competitive Oscar, for best original screenplay.
Da 5 Bloods (2020)
Four Vietnam War veterans (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) return to the battlefield of their youth in search of the remains of their fallen squad leader (Chadwick Boseman), as well as the buried treasure they left behind, in this blistering war epic—a still-all-too-rare exploration of the African-American experience in that decades-spanning conflict, in which they were deployed to the front in disproportionate numbers. Deeply moving and unexpectedly funny, frequently shocking, and always entertaining, it’s classic Spike Lee.
