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80The new drama, best viewed as a church movie, is a return to the kind of corner-chat indie cinema Lee revolutionized, with an emphasis on a towering performance by The Wire's Clarke Peters as a local bishop inflamed with the Word.
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80Red Hook Summer begins as a gentle character comedy and then erupts into a sudden reversal that is possibly the most powerful and disturbing sequence Lee has ever created. It's a film that makes you laugh, weep, rage and gasp, and, love it or hate it, you will definitely talk about it afterward.
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75The seamless juxtaposition of faith and pain, innocence and guilt, allows the film to transcend Spike Lee's occasional bombastic moments and become a strong examination of internal suffering.
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75Ultimately, Lee's clarity of vision hasn't been this sharp or unique since before "Crooklyn," and it's thrilling with Red Hook Summer to witness a return to the technique – and most of all, emotional wallop – that even today continues to give his films an enduring life as both entertainment, and enlightenment.
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Aug 10, 201270This is a film made by a wiser man who recognizes that everybody's looking for salvation in their own way. In the end, as the camera revisits the cast of broken, fallen characters, we may realize that Red Hook, as far as Spike Lee is concerned, is a state of mind.
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63It's a scramble, marked by the unruly variety of visual strategies Lee prefers.
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63Here is Lee at his most spontaneous and sincere, but he could have used another screenplay draft, and perhaps a few more transitional scenes.
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60Although the film features a powerhouse performance by Clarke Peters as Da Good Bishop Enouch Rouse, it's saddled with a sloppy story.
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60The result feels like a sketchbook, both in a good and bad sense; it's alive and spontaneous and surprising in some parts, underdeveloped and shapeless in others.
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60Spike Lee's messy, meandering, bluntly polemical Red Hook Summer has one crucial ingredient: a raw vitality.
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Jul 20, 201260For those expecting Mookie's mid-career encore to signify a return to Spike Lee's roots, Red Hook Summer instead surprises -- and to some extent delights -- as yet another radically unique entry in the director's iconoclastic oeuvre.
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58This isn't the "Right Thing" in any sense.
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58The film's 121-minute running time is similarly cause for concern. Lee can be tight and focused as a gun-for-hire, but he's always viewed personal projects as irresistible invitations to self-indulgence and overreaching. Red Hook Summer is no exception.
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50In truth, the film fizzles as much as it fumes.
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50In this bad-better-best movie, the Flik story is the bad, the choir singing much better and Peters the soul-stirring best.
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50It's painful to watch Red Hook Summer stumble, because the man behind it has tried so hard to get his groove back. However, it's energizing in the fleeting moments when he does just that.
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50An alternately evocative and lumbering portrait of a multifaceted community.
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42Red Hook Summer has some fantastic gospel numbers, but as drama it's a casserole that never comes together.
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40There's little drama or sense of progression in the movie until the bombshell hits, and then it just whimpers along for another half-hour until the end.
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40At some point, Lee as a storyteller must step in to move things along, to dig the rudder deep into the narrative waters and steer this ship. The destination is almost irrelevant - just steer it somewhere.
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40We have little to hang onto once the film falls apart. Between the ongoing sermonizing and that final, sharp shock - which is gravely mishandled - we feel cowed into submission, rather than led towards enlightenment.
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30A clear failure, yet Lee is getting at things that mystify him, and I was touched by parts of the movie. [13 & 20 Aug. 2012, p.97]
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Jul 20, 201230Lee's latest rambles through almost two hours of unfocused drama, burdened with endless didactic editorializing, before lurching out of nowhere into ugly revelations and violence.
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25How many doubts can Lee possibly cram into one motion picture? Red Hook Summer has almost too many to count: moments that go clunk, followed by others that go clang; actors who talk as if reading their lines off cue cards or rehearsing them for the first time; and set pieces that lie there.
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12Formerly a maker of bad, but at least angry, movies, Spike Lee now seems to be trying to be the world's oldest student filmmaker. Take out the rookie mistakes from Red Hook Summer, and there'd be nothing left.