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Twenty-four feature films in, Spike Lee is certainly the most provocative director in the game. His latest film, Highest 2 Lowest, is a suspense-saddled crowd pleaser -- funny, fast-paced, and topical as hell -- reworking Akira Kurosawa's 1963 bombshell, High and Low, with a scorching Denzel Washington as the target of a ransom imbroglio. There's some Celtics slander, a chortle-piquing anecdote about A.I., and that viscous free-floating dolly zoom. The 68-year-old director is in his proverbial bag, flexing his deep filmic bona fides with indelible imagery, hysterical dialogue, and politically charged asides that are sure to keep viewers engrossed in much the same way as She's Gotta Have It did 38 years ago.
Just in case you've been living under a rock since Wikipedia became a thing in the world, it's been one doozy after another since the outset of Spike's persistent career. After charming (and scandalizing!) moviegoers in 1986 with his libidinous heroine Nola Darling (the "she" in She's Gotta Have It), Spike convened his braintrust. He cast royal Robi Reed, cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, and costume designer Ruth E. Carter to populate his films with brilliant characters, glorious, dramatic earth-toned hues, and eclectic wardrobes that celebrated heritage and announced agency. That cool sense of identity has informed every Spike Lee Joint since 1988's majestic School Daze, culminating in recent highlights like 2018's BlacKkKlansman and 2020's Da 5 Bloods, which won the acidic director an Oscar and a Critics' Choice Movie Award, respectively. The arthouse and the mainstream are supposedly antithetical to one another, yet that batty amalgam is totally Spike's M.O.
It was damn near impossible to rank all the films in such a pivotal catalog. But it's essentially one of those "good" problems. We vegged out in front of the screen and made it a Spike Sanctum, ranking all twenty of his movies (not including the shorts and documentaries) from worst (but way better than your faves!) to best. Keep reading to see if you agree with our choices.