Chi-Raq
Lionsgate | Release Date: December 4, 2015 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
77
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 37 Critic Reviews
Positive:
31
Mixed:
5
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Entertainment WeeklyJoe McGovernDec 3, 2015
Erupting like a scalding geyser from the ground right beneath our feet, Spike Lee’s daring, dizzying, sympathetic, symphonic, vital, vehement Chi-Raq is the most urgently 2015 movie of 2015. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzDec 3, 2015
The movie is angry and horrified and mournful but also warm, sensual, life affirming, and so blisteringly funny that critics and political commentators are sure to blast it as distasteful. Read full review
100
Village VoiceAmy NicholsonDec 1, 2015
Chi-Raq is a marvel. It's Lee resurrecting his voice — angry, impassioned, and funny as hell — right when we need to hear it. Read full review
100
The GuardianJordan HoffmanNov 26, 2015
While formally quite different from his more universally-respected early work, Chi-Raq has the exuberance and wit you’ll find in Do The Right Thing and Crooklyn. It’s the best film he’s made in a very long time. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinDec 4, 2015
Bitches, it’s always a good month in America for an antigun movie. The newest, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, might be the best ever. It’s sexy, brash, and potent — a powerful weapon in its own right. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisDec 3, 2015
The laughs in Spike Lee’s corrosive Chi-Raq burn like acid. Urgent, surreal, furious, funny and wildly messy, the movie sounds like an invitation to defeat, but it’s an improbable triumph that finds Mr. Lee doing his best work in years. Read full review
90
SalonAndrew O'HehirDec 3, 2015
Nick Cannon’s complicated and masterful performance as Chi-Raq, a young man who embodies the contradictions of his community, who is both a perpetrator and a victim of the heartless violence that has surrounded him all his life, accomplishes that. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenJun 21, 2020
With Chi-Raq, Spike Lee is vital again. This isn’t to say I agree with all of the movie’s politics or that he’s made a perfect film. What I mean is that he’s once again brought something necessary to the screen in a way that no other director could. Read full review
88
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanJan 15, 2016
Chi-Raq is indeed interesting, challenging, provocative and consistently entertaining in its outrageous depiction of life in modern Chicago. And nobody in mainstream filmmaking today except Spike Lee could or would have done it. Read full review
88
Washington PostAnn HornadayDec 3, 2015
The through-line of Chi-Raq is a sense of crisis that Lee refuses to reduce to binary causes, but interprets in terms of history, economics and psychology, as well as the personal, political and spiritual. Read full review
88
USA TodayBrian TruittDec 3, 2015
Spike Lee has been trying to get people to do the right thing for years, but with Chi-Raq, he solidifies a peaceful movie message in lyrical as well as powerful fashion. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineSam C. MacDec 1, 2015
A Spike Lee joint in the urgent sociopolitical register of Radio Raheem's boombox—a call to arms that's also a call to disarm. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperNov 23, 2015
It’s a shattering, thunderous wake-up alarm, a call to lay down arms, a gutsy social satire and a highly stylized work of fiction that sometimes feels as accurate and sobering as the crime reporting you see on the front page of this newspaper. Read full review
87
TheWrapKevin B. LeeNov 23, 2015
If the film’s pinning much of the world’s problems to sex at times seems excessive, silly or reductive, Lee justifies it with moments of unexpected grace. Read full review
83
The Film StageRaffi AsdourianMar 18, 2016
Chi-Raq can be deliriously satirical, bouncing between comedy, romance, and tragedy, yet it primarily serves as a wake up call for the disenfranchised people suffering in this country. Read full review
80
Total FilmKevin HarleyDec 20, 2016
Right from the first frame the urgency rarely wanes as Lee juggles fireworks, firearms and feminism. Read full review
80
EmpireOlly RichardsNov 28, 2016
A Molotov cocktail of laughs and anger, Chi-Raq is a powerful state of a nation address. The result is the most creatively exciting Lee has been in a decade. Read full review
80
SlateAisha HarrisDec 3, 2015
Lee has managed to again make a movie worth debating, wrestling with, and maybe even hating, depending upon how you feel about him as a director. Read full review
80
VarietyJustin ChangNov 23, 2015
Lee’s vision of a scarred, gutted city may not please the tourism board, but his movie is better for it: Its seething dramatic texture captures a deeper, more elusive beauty that — like reconciliation, reform or any other human ideal — can only be achieved when the illusion of safety is left behind. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenDec 2, 2015
Chi-Raq constantly shifts tones from comedy to drama and back again, while most of its dialogue is delivered in rhyming couplets. The transitions can sometimes be bumpy, but never when Samuel L. Jackson pops up as nattily dressed and off-color one-man Greek chorus. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Julia CooperMar 18, 2016
This film is many things at once: It is didactic but ambitious, affecting but satirical, absurd but also poignant. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreDec 8, 2015
Chi-Raq is Spike Lee’s most audacious film in decades. DECADES. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrDec 3, 2015
His carnival-esque filmmaking style, which can leave some Spike Lee joints in tatters, helps this one expand in sorrowful heart and indomitable wit. Chi-Raq is a vibrant community mural of a movie, and it stretches to the horizon. Read full review
75
New York PostJoe NeumaierDec 3, 2015
We know Lee can channel anger into art. Now, in the maiden feature for Amazon Studios, he adds poetry, beginning with the spoken-word verse that fills the movie. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianJeff BakerDec 3, 2015
It doesn't all work. The energy and the performances by Cannon, Parris and Hudson can't carry a movie that careens from camp to tragedy to farce without taking a breath. Several scenes could have been cut, particularly a long, dumb take on sex and the Civil War that ends with a horny old goat in Stars-and-Bars skivvies. Read full review
75
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonDec 3, 2015
Chi-Raq is a mess — tonally inconsistent, overbearing in its earnestness and badly in need of editing. But it’s also director Spike Lee’s most passionate film since “25th Hour” (2002). Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzDec 3, 2015
It is intense and uneven, moving and maddening, all in just about equal measure. But an angry Lee is an interesting Lee, and he’s really angry here. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyNov 23, 2015
Even if the now-veteran director lays everything on a bit thick, repeatedly makes many of the same points and lets things go on too long, he's still found a lively and legitimate way to tackle urgent subject matter that other filmmakers have found excuses to avoid. Read full review
63
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaDec 3, 2015
In-your-face polemic, with nowhere to go once the point has been made. Repeatedly. Read full review
63
Rolling StonePeter TraversDec 3, 2015
Here's Spike Lee at his ballsiest. Who else would take Aristophanes' Lysistrata, set in ancient Greece, and prop it up in present-day Englewood, Chicago, where violence is so prevalent the locals call it Chi-Raq, a mash-up of "Chicago" and "Iraq." Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsNov 23, 2015
If Chi-Raq disarms even a small percentage of those who see it, and provokes any reflection about a gun culture, the uses of satire and the plight of a sadly emblematic city, it was worth the effort. However mixed-up the results. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsStephen Whitty Dec 2, 2015
Jackson is terrific, of course, although he's the spice here, not the main meal. As Lysistrata, Teyonah Parris is a fierce, finger-snapping leader while, as her man Chi-Raq, a cast-against-type Nick Cannon, is surprisingly tough and moody. Read full review
58
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezNov 30, 2015
While its ambition does show a director still aspiring for great heights, its patchy execution only partly restores the faith. Read full review
50
The New YorkerAnthony LaneDec 17, 2015
The topic is so grave, and the corralling of ancient Greek comedy so audacious, that you long for Chi-Raq to succeed. Sad to report, it’s an awkward affair, stringing out its tearful scenes of mourning, and going wildly astray with its lurches into farce. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleDavid LewisDec 3, 2015
In the end, Chi-Raq is a positive movie that wants to jolt us into doing something about the very real emergency in Chicago. Along the way, the execution of the narrative gets muddled, but there’s no denying that this risk-taking film has a pulse. A strong pulse. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyDec 2, 2015
Chi-Raq, Lee’s modernized take on "Lysistrata," is mostly bad art; it’s about an hour too long, sometimes leadenly unfunny, and set in Chicago, a place the Brooklynite director has no feel for. Read full review
30
Screen DailyJohn HazeltonNov 23, 2015
Though it sometimes recalls the irresistibly energetic, genre-bending feel of Lee’s best films – Do The Right Thing in particular – it lacks the assurance and unifying thrust that made those features work so well. Read full review
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