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No one has quite depicted Black Americans in all their glory, flaws, and reality like Spike Lee. The filmmaker contributed greatly to the independent movement of American films in the 1980s, and Lee’s unique vision and mise en scène won over audiences. He had his breakthrough with the social satire Do The Right Thing and has not looked back since.

Lee is currently working on his 25th film as a director and will be working with A24 on Highest 2 Lowest, an official remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low. The filmmaker has an eclectic filmography even if many of his films tend to talk about one topic in particular. So, here are ten underrated Spike Lee movies.

10. Jungle Fever A still from Jungle Fever | Credits: Universal Pictures

Spike Lee’s fifth film Jungle Fever explores themes that he would again include in his next work Malcolm X....

Despite a muted reception back in May 1994 — certainly compared to Spike Lee’s previous film “Malcolm X” — “Crooklyn” has endured for three decades as one of the director’s most treasured films.

At the time, Spike Lee was still in the first decade of his career as a director, and “Crookyln” marked his seventh film in nine years with his “brand” in the popular consciousness as a polemical artist at the vanguard of the ’90s Black New Wave that also featured filmmakers such as John Singleton, Mario Van Peebles, and the Hughes Brothers.

Crooklyn, while fitting within Spike’s collected body of work about the Black experience in America, took a detour in tone from his earlier, more overtly political films such as “Do the Right Thing” and “Jungle Fever.” Contemporary reactions to the film were mixed, and “Crooklyn,” like all of Spike’s post-”Malcolm X” films up to “Inside Man,...

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From “Do the Right Thing” to “Da 5 Bloods,” Spike Lee’s film catalog is packed with classics that have shaped Black cinema, and film at large. The Brooklyn-born auteur is known for a unique storytelling style, and of course, his signature double-dolly shot (where the character remains stationary while the background moves), which he’s used in several films including “Mo’ Better Blueseppice” and “Malcolm X.”

Last week, Film at Lincoln Center presented Lee with the Chaplin Award during the 46th Chaplin Award Gala, held at New York City’s Alice Tully Hall. The celebration, which was delayed a year because of the pandemic, included an excerpt from Lee’s HBO documentary...

Chicago – It’s been a fast four weeks, and the 25th anniversary edition of the Black Harvest Film Festival in Chicago will have its Closing Night on Thursday, August 29th, 2019, at the Gene Siskel Film Center in the downtown Loop. The special presentation will be the 25th Anniversary celebration of Spike Lee’s “Crooklyn,” and will feature appearances by Joie Lee (Spike’s sister and co-screenwriter) and actress Zelda Harris from the film. Click here for tickets and more information.

“Crooklyn” (1994) was Spike Lee’s seventh film, right after his Oscar nominated “Malcolm X,” and is often noted as his most personal work. It focuses on a Brooklyn family in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where Lee and his three siblings grew up (brother and sister Cinqué and Joie Lee were co-screenwriters). The film family struggles through life in 1973, with serious challenges. Spike also performs in the film, as a colorful neighborhood glue sniffer named Snuffy.

The writer-actor returns with body-swap movie Little. She talks millennial awkwardness and why she’s taking on Hollywood

“Growing up, the only young black female lead that I saw in a movie was in Crooklyn,” recalls Issa Rae. The 1994 film, directed and co-written by Spike Lee, starred Zelda Harris as nine-year old Troy Carmichael, growing up in New York’s Bed-Stuy neighbourhood with her four brothers. “That was the first time I saw a movie and thought: ‘Oh, that girl and her family is like mine,’” says Rae, herself one of five children, who was also nine when the movie came out.

“There was such a dearth of films like that,” she continues. “And the high-school teen movie is a genre that I love. Everything at that age is so heightened and dramatic, and high-school movies capture that so perfectly. But those films are all white, too; there’s no...

After more than 30 years behind the camera, Spike Lee remains one of the most provocative filmmakers working. His latest examination of American racism, “BlacKkKlansman,” has gotten some of the best reviews of his career. How does it compare to the rest of his filmography? Tour through our photo gallery above of Lee’s 15 greatest films ranked from worst to best.

Lee debuted with the independent breakout hit “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), made when he was just 29 years old. The film helped usher in a new era of black cinema, paving the way for the likes of John Singleton (“Boyz N the Hood”), Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”), Ryan Coogler (“Black Panther”), Ava DuVernay (“Selma”), Lee Daniels (“Precious”), Steve McQueen (“12 Years a Slave”), Jordan Peele (“Get Out”), and Dee Rees (“Mudbound”) to make a variety of films about the African American experience.

He earned his first Oscar nomination three years later:...

Tfe is celebrating the three Honorary Oscar winners this week. Here's Kieran discussing one of Spike Lee's warmest and most underappreciated films.

For better or worse, you can often feel a larger thesis statement, be it about race and/or American culture at large, running through much of Spike Lee’s work. His films also feel incredibly male in their perspective. Even his few films that foreground women (She’s Gotta Have It and Girl 6) feel enveloped by the male gaze, despite their many other virtues. These are just a couple of reasons why Lee’s semi-autobiographical slice-of-life dramedy Crooklyn feels like a bit of a curio.

Crooklyn is set in the summer of 1973 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Lee himself grew up. Nine-year-old Troy Carmichael (Zelda Harris) is the only girl in a brood that includes four rowdy brothers. Though often put-upon and teased, Troy is tough,...

In the deep South, African-American single father Gaten (Ernie Hudson) and his ten year old daughter Clover (Zelda Harris) form a tight knit family, where they own an orchard. Gaten is recently widowed when he marries Sara Kate (Elizabeth McGovern) a white woman. His family is less than happy about this development, but when tragedy strikes and Clover is placed in Sara Kate’s care, everyone is forced to put their differences aside.

There’s nothing wrong with the premise of this film, it sets up a core conflict and the resolution is heartening. A cameo by Loretta Devine (Waiting to Exhale) as Gaten’s sister Everline serves to spice things up. However, weakness in writing leave the viewer to notice other things, like how the film is highly stylized in an early nineties fashion, how Sara Kate spends far too much time yelling “Gaten! Gaten! Gaten” while collapsing on the bed,...

Slow news day today… stumbled upon this post from 2009, back when the site had about 10 readers . Thought I’d repost since there are so many more of you regulars now, who probably haven’t seen it.

I do that from time to time, as some of you may have already noticed. But anyway, here ya go…

My good man, self-proclaimed cinephile, aesthete, dad, unrepentant liberal, resolute agnostic, English teacher, filmmaker-manqué, and once co-host of the previous incarnation of my podcast, The Obenson Report, the Genius Bastard himself, Mr Brandon Wilson, decided to utilize Twitter to count down his list of Spike Lee’s 10 Worst Female Characters. And since Twitter only allows a 140-character limit per post, he had to keep his analysis succinct, spread out over several Tweets.

I told Brandon that I’ll post each entry on his list, as he Tweets them, and combined them all in this post.

Roswell, N.M. - The aliens have returned! Maybe not returned so much as finally arrived on home video with the release of Dark Skies: The Declassified Complete Series on DVD. Startling enough, the show only lasted a season on NBC in 1996. It gained a large cult with an alternative history of America in the ’60s. “History as we know it is a lie” was the startling series slogan. John Loengard (Eric Close) went from plucky congressional aide to a member of the ultra creepy Majestic 12 run by Frank Bach (J.T. Walsh) to battle the alien menace. An equally bizarre transformation happens to his girlfriend, Kimberly Sayers (Megan Ward). She gets alien abducted and returned. The perky perfect sixties gal goes to dark side. Can he bring her back?

Megan Ward called up the Party Favors hotline for a brief chat about the series, being covered in cow guts,...