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Clockers
Metascore
71 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 20 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 14 out of 20
  2. Mixed: 6 out of 20
  3. Negative: 0 out of 20
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  1. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    100
    A work of staggering intelligence and emotional force -- a mosaic of broken dreams.
  2. Time
    Reviewed by: Richard Schickel
    90
    The film is more than a murder mystery and more than a study in character conflict. At its best, it is an intense and complex portrait of an urban landscape on which the movies' gaze has not often fallen.
  3. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Kevin McManus
    90
    As always, Lee fills his story with bold, vivid, glib characters who manage to be entertaining even as they flail at one another.
  4. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    88
    Although Clockers is... a murder mystery, in solving its murder, it doesn't even begin to find a solution to the system that led to the murder. That is the point.
  5. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    80
    Clockers, Lee's eighth feature in nine years, demonstrates how accomplished a filmmaker he has become, securely in control of plot, actors and imagery.
  6. Newsweek
    Reviewed by: David Ansen
    80
    In Lee's understandable eagerness to let a few rays of hope shine, the polemicist trips up the dramatist--movie conventions replace honest observation. But the passion of this raw, mournful urban epic remains, in spite of the false moves. [25 Sep 1995, p.92]
    All this critic's reviews
  7. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: Anthony Lane
    80
    Though Lee still can't resist a fancy visual trick from time to time, Clockers is, at its best-in its compound of the jaunty and the depressing-his ripest work to date.
  8. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    78
    This is the first Spike Lee Joint that feels more like a mainstream Hollywood cops-in-the-'hood picture and less like one of Lee's recurrent soapboxes.
  9. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Edward Guthmann
    75
    Clockers has the strengths of Lee's best work (passion, humor, terrific acting) without the preachiness, self-importance and gimmicky camera moves of his weakest.
  10. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    75
    Ultimately, Clockers probably attempts too much, and ends up seeming overcrowded as a result.
  11. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    75
    While the result is visually brilliant, it's oddly disjointed and packs less emotional force than Richard Price's novel.
  12. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Janet Maslin
    70
    Beyond its grit and nonchalance, this story has a resigned, reflective, hard-earned wisdom that's unusual in an American film about such familiarly lurid subject matter. It's even more unusual in a film by Spike Lee.
  13. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Staff(Not Credited)
    63
    Spike Lee's adaptation of a solid, if overpraised, crime novel by Richard Price is slickly made and well acted. But with most of the novel's subplots stripped away, it emerges as just another polemic about the scourge of drugs in the African-American community.
  14. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Mike Clark
    63
    Lee captures the despair, self-delusion, occasional terror and frequent humor of a praised and popular novel, aided by the potent acting his direction virtually guarantees. [13 Sep 1995, p.01.D]
    All this critic's reviews
  15. Empire
    Reviewed by: Angie Errigo
    60
    Not Lee's finest but intriguing nonetheless.
  16. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Hal Hinson
    60
    The central story itself is not distinctive, and though Lee certainly churns up a lot of dust, he never captures the mythic quality that made Price's original seem so much bigger than its almost generic cast of players.
  17. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Rosenbaum
    60
    The performances are strong, but the spectator often feels adrift in an overly busy intrigue.
  18. San Francisco Examiner
    Reviewed by: Barbara Shulgasser
    50
    Lee seems to think that all his major characters are basically good people who deserve another chance, and so for the sake of an inappropriate happy ending, everyone important gets one.
  19. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Rick Groen
    50
    This is an adaptation that must have been hard to screw up, yet screwed up it has been. If the movie is far from dreadful, it's even further from the searing experience it could have been.
  20. Variety
    Reviewed by: Todd McCarthy
    50
    A study of the urban dope-dealing culture and its toll on everyone who comes in contact with it, the picture has an insider's feel that is constantly undercut by the filmmaker's impulse to editorialize.
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