| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
This is a terrific movie: jolting, savage, horrifically funny, nightmarishly exciting but also brainy and compassionate.
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| 91 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Lee's control and storytelling flair have never seemed more assured and there are moments so powerful and thrilling we feel we're in the hands of a master filmmaker at the peak of his powers.
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| 90 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Lee at his best, a virtuoso piece of filmmaking that's stylish, substantial, and rich in detail.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Lee has a wealth of material here, and the film tumbles through it with exuberance.
|
| 80 |
Salon.com
Sarah Vowell
An urban epic, a noisy, swirling, flawed, hilarious, witty, tender, violent, questionable train wreck.
|
| 80 |
Film Threat
Lee gives us cross-section of characters, almost none of whom escape the summer unchanged.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Examiner
One of Lee's unsung gifts as a filmmaker is his discovery of that place between eye-popping surrealism and wrenching Greek tragedy.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
The most refreshing thing about Summer of Sam is that it doesn't try to impose a moral or define the limits of its story.
|
| 75 |
ReelViews
It is a dark, violent, sexually explicit motion picture that will surely offend timid viewers.
|
| 70 |
Village Voice
A film in which many things seem to happen twice and others not at all.
|
| 70 |
The New York Times
This film, like the dazzling but many-tentacled "He Got Game" before it, makes up in fury much of what it lacks in form.
|
| 70 |
Chicago Reader
Like most of Lee’s work, this movie bites off a lot more than it can possibly chew, and it bristles with the worst kind of New York provincialism.
|
| 70 |
TV Guide
A tabloid slice of tabloid life, ragged, vivid, awkward and punchy all at once.
|
| 70 |
Newsweek
A thick stew of sex, violence and suspicion, Lee's movie -- spiked up with a virtually nonstop soundtrack -- definitely has the power to jangle your nerves.
|
| 70 |
Variety
Summer of Sam is never less than absorbing but feels just a bit like yesterday's news, both narratively and cinematically.
|
| 70 |
LA Weekly
Brilliant, goofy, vindictive, incoherent and compassionate, Summer of Sam begins as a work of startling ambition, spins out of control, and finally limps to a bland halt.
|
| 67 |
Austin Chronicle
An intelligent, viscerally kinetic throw-down, a jolt of pure adrenalized Spike that holds more than a few touches of genius in its overripe storyline.
|
| 63 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
It's a kaleidoscope of ideas that range from exciting to silly and gaudy.
|
| 60 |
Washington Post
Hobbled by a multiplicity of narrative lines and superfluous, often stereotypical characters, the movie suffers from a lack of both focus and passion.
|
| 60 |
New York Magazine
It's all been done before, and better.
|
| 60 |
Slate
Spike Lee is a virtuoso filmmaker, a wizard at selling a sequence, but he'll never make an entirely coherent movie until he learns to go deeper into his subjects instead of wider with them.
|
| 60 |
Los Angeles Times
A glum and unpleasant experience, caught between what it wants to do and how it has chosen to do it.
|
| 60 |
The New Yorker
Slamming different kinds of experience together, Lee tries to do with montage what he cannot do with dramatic logic.
|
| 50 |
Dallas Observer
The cast has plenty of room to emote, but their task feels a bit empty and thankless. For the most part, they're carrying the director's water.
|
| 50 |
Washington Post
If there's any moral to this sorry story, perhaps Lee's stealth-message is it: Even when it's not about race, it is.
|
| 50 |
Entertainment Weekly
Spike Lee noisily attempts to place the hunt for real-life serial killer David Berkowitz at the center of a hotheaded sociological fantasy linking disco glitz, punk rebellion, ethnic insularity, sexual craving, and sizzling heat into one rattling chain of urban hysteria.
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