Spike Lee Movies, Ranked

Released in 2004, Lee's worst-reviewed film stars Anthony Mackie as a highly-paid executive turned whistleblower who becomes a $10,000-a-pop stud for his lesbian ex-girlfriend (Kerry Washington) and her friends. Lee attempts to comment on corporate greed and sexual politics in America, but loses his way in an over-long mess of subplots and sex. But judging from our User Score the film does have its fans, and you can count Roger Ebert among them.

"Spike Lee's She Hate Me is his worst movie ever--even worse than 'Bamboozled,' his self-serving indictment of modern minstrelsy, which at least was worth arguing about." —Peter Rainer, Vulture

Hoping to correct Hollywood's failure to recognize the contributions of African American soldiers in World War II, Lee directed this adaptation of a novel by James McBride (who wrote the screenplay) about four members of the all-Black 92nd "Buffalo Soldier" Division who find themselves trapped in a Tuscan village behind enemy lines. Even the few critics who were positive on this 2008 box office bomb found its 160 minutes excessive.

"You may begin to wonder if Lee really initiated this project or if it only fell into his hands after Roberto Benigni proved unavailable." —Scott Foundas, Village Voice

The first film Lee directed but did not write is a "comedy" by future Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog). The 1996 film stars Theresa Randle as a struggling actress who becomes a phone sex operator to make a living. Bookended by audition scenes that would have even more relevance in the #MeToo era, the film features a soundtrack by Prince and cameos by Madonna, Quentin Tarantino, Halle Berry and Naomi Campbell.

"Spike Lee deserved a vacation after putting himself through the grueling emotions of Clockers, but Girl 6 is too flimsy to excuse even as cinematic R&R. Frenetic but lazily conceived, it's like one of those puny low-budget toss-offs Brian De Palma used to spring on us when he thought nobody was looking." —Mike Clark, USA Today

Shot in only 18 days with an inexperienced young lead, this 2006 release was Lee's first film to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Inspired by the religious upbringing of co-writer James McBride, the film follows 13-year-old Flick as he spends the summer with his grandfather, a bishop played by The Wire's Clarke Peters in a widely praised performance. For some critics, the film's quick production schedule resulted in a film that feels both alive and underdeveloped.

"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." —Nathan Rabin, A.V. Club

This highly anticipated remake of Park Chan-wook's Oldboy proved to be a disappointment with critics and at the box office, where it earned just over $5 million worldwide against its $30 million budget. Josh Brolin stars in this 2013 revenge thriller that failed to improve on the original in any way. Lee battled with producers over the final edit, eventually cutting the film from about 140 minutes down to 105.

"Spike Lee's remake of 2003's Oldboy is as brutally perplexing as the South Korean original, and needless for both its repetition and tweaks. Nothing is really lost in translation, or gained." —Steve Persall, Tampa Bay Times

This 2002 documentary about football legend, actor, and activist Jim Brown played in its full 130-minute length in New York prior to airing on HBO in an edited version. The film proves more successful in its depiction of Brown's on-the-field accomplishments than in its exploration of the ups and downs of his post-football life.

"A model of cohesion and clarity as long as it's dealing with Brown's exemplary public achievements. However, pic quickly becomes mired in tedium and confusion when it turns to Brown's scandal-ridden private life." —Ronnie Scheib, Variety

A musical satire of college life at a Black university, Spike Lee's sophomore film might not be the slump the majority of critics thought it was upon its release in 1988. Ambitiously weaving together comedy, social commentary, and musical numbers, the film feels like a model for the confrontational cinema ("Wake up!") Lee would produce throughout his career and proved to be an influence on directors like John Singleton (Higher Learning) and Justin Simien (Dear White People).

"Despite a few high-spirited sequences, School Daze succumbs to preachiness and choppiness. It's a movie with too much to say and not enough style to say it with." —Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune

This 2015 Kickstarter-funder riff on Bill Gunn's 1973 horror film Ganja and Hess is a bit of an anomaly in Lee's filmography. Shot in 16 days, the film allows atmosphere, gore, and sex to rule over Lee's typically overstuffed, direct-address cinema (not that race and class are ignored in any way).

"Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is at once too much and yet somehow not enough. On the one hand, it's exciting to see the always envelope-pushing Lee working without a studio- or distributor-imposed safety net... But while the film never lacks for ambition, it fails to satisfy emotionally or intellectually in the ways Lee intends." —Scott Foundas, Variety

This divisive satire about how mass media perpetuates racism stars Damon Wayans as a television writer who hopes his latest show idea, a new minstrel show featuring Black actors in blackface, will get him fired. It does not. Now part of the Criterion Collection, the film proved Lee to be, once again, ahead of his time, willing to push himself (he shot on cheap digital video) and his audience.

"Spike Lee lost his nerve -- there are moments here, too, when it also seems like he lost his sense." —Manohla Dargis, LA Weekly

Spike Lee's first collaboration with Denzel Washington came on the heels of Do the Right Thing and suffered for it. In what amounts to a beautifully photographed, well-acted, but slightly clunky character study, Washington plays Bleek Gilliam, a jazz trumpeter saddled with a bad manager (Lee) and a love for two women. The Branford Marsalis quartet featuring Terence Blanchard on trumpet dubs the music for Bleek's band.

"Spike Lee is too passionate and distinctive a film maker to make a lousy movie. So although Mo' Better Blues, his latest, is a misfire, there is a personality behind every camera shot. An audience is willing to go farther down the road with Lee than with another film maker, and even when, as in this case, the road leads nowhere, it's hard to resent the trip." —Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

This 1998 release scripted by Lee stars Ray Allen as Jesus Shuttlesworth, the top-ranked basketball prospect in the country, and Denzel Washington as Jake, his imprisoned father who's out on parole for a week to convince his son to play for the governor's alma mater in return for a reduced sentence. Spike Lee's love of basketball, and the Knicks in particular, is well known, but for many critics, Lee's directing skills far exceeded his screenwriting ability on this project.

"Flaws and all, this may be Spike's most purely enjoyable movie, and his best looking." —David Ansen, Newsweek

Written by Lee with siblings Joie and Cinqué, this intimate family drama from 1994 follows the sweeping epic Malcolm X. Set in the 1970s, the very personal film (the siblings pulled from their childhoods, including their mother's illness) focuses on the coming-of-age of Troy Carmichael (Zelda Harris), the only daughter of five children born to a Woody (Delroy Lindo), a struggling musician, and Carolyn (Alfre Woodard), a schoolteacher. One directorial flourish confused audiences: When Troy stays with her more affluent uncle and aunt, the image appears squeezed because Lee shot the film with anamorphic lenses but projected them in the same aspect ratio as the rest of the film.

"Messy as the semiautobiographical Crooklyn often is, it succeeds in becoming a touching and generous family portrait, a film that exposes welcome new aspects of this director's talent." —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

Lee's second Michael Jackson documentary (Bad 25 appears later on this list) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016. It's an uncritical look at a working artist in transition. A track-by-track breakdown of Off the Wall is the film's highlight, but Lee's failure to delve deeper into Jackson's demons irked some critics.

"It's a brazen celebration of Jackson, which unlike Lee's other documentary work doesn't look under the hood to tell the whole story and examine some of the more uncomfortable inner workings." —Lanre Bakare, The Guardian

Set during the summer of 1977 when David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz's killing spree spread paranoia through New York, this 1999 release focuses on an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx. The cast is led by John Leguizamo as a philandering hairdresser, Mira Sorvino as his wife, and Adrien Brody as a punk-loving stripper who becomes the neighborhood outcast.

"It's a kaleidoscope of ideas that range from exciting to silly and gaudy." —Liam Lacey, The Globe and Mail

When it was released in 2002, some critics were not convinced that future Game of Thrones showrunner David Benioff's story of a drug dealer's last 24 hours before a seven-year prison sentence coalesced with Lee's ruminations on 9/11. Now, almost two decades later, many think Lee's ability to adapt the movie to capture the aftermath of 9/11 results in not only one of the best films on the subject, but also the one film that fully captures the trauma of a city and a country.

"If 25th Hour does not quite work as a plausible and coherent story, it produces a wrenching, dazzling succession of moods." —Dana Stevens, The New York Times

Lee's 2012 documentary celebrating the 25th anniversary of Michael Jackson's 1987 album Bad premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It focuses on Jackson as an artist and collaborator. For some critics that was enough, but one wonders how its reception would change in the wake of the controversial Leaving Neverland.

"A blockbuster melange of Motown, metal, hip-hop, world and gospel influences, bound by trailblazing production, 'Bad' has stood in its predecessor's shadow too long, and Spike Lee convincingly makes the case for reassessment with this exhaustive and entertaining if less-than-penetrating documentary on its creation." —Guy Lodge, Variety

From its opening crime-scene credit sequence, Lee's adaptation of Richard Price's novel takes a hard look at the effects of the criminal justice system on Black families. This 1995 release was originally slated to be a Martin Scorsese film, but he dropped out to direct Casino.

"Clockers, Lee's eighth feature in nine years, demonstrates how accomplished a filmmaker he has become, securely in control of plot, actors and imagery." —Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

Five years after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Lee returned to catch up with some of the people he interviewed in When the Levees Broke. Surveying the rebuilding effort, he finds tiny glimmers of hope in the city's slow recovery, but the film meanders a bit, spending time with Brad Pitt and even encompassing the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

"Lee has sacrificed some clarity for inclusiveness; this is the document as monument, artful and rough by turns, and determined to be as big as its subject." —Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times

Filmed on February 26 and 27, 2000 with ten cameras at a show in Charlotte, North Carolina, The Original Kings of Comedy captures the incredibly successful comedy tour of Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, and Bernie Mac. Lee's light touch lets the comics shine.

"A fresh, intimate, gloriously unpolished performance film that measures up to the classics of the genre." —Bill Gallo, Dallas Observer

Except for a surprising cameo at the end of the film and the opening credit sequence in which the words of Malcom X can be heard over a montage of a burning American flag and the beating of Rodney King, Lee takes a surprisingly conventional approach to this biopic. That was a disappointment for many critics in 1992, but few could deny the power of Denzel Washington's Oscar-nominated lead performance.

"A mortal movie about an immortal subject and the very fact that it succeeds as well as it does is a testament to Lee's skills as a filmmaker." —Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle

In 2017, Lee filmed a Steppenwolf Theater Company production of Antoinette Nwandu's play directed by Danya Taymor. Inspired by Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Pass Over follows two Black men spending their day on a Chicago street corner talking and dodging gunfire. Lee opens the film showing the audience being bussed in from Saint Sabina Church and wraps the film with another powerful montage.

"Once again, Spike Lee has found an innovative theatrical production and brought it to blistering cinematic life." —Daniel Schindel, The Film Stage

Lee's highest-grossing film is, not surprisingly, his most conventional, but it is also proof that he can make a very entertaining, straightforward heist film. After Ron Howard left the project to direct Cinderella Man, Lee stepped in, aiming to make his version of Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon with a cast led by Denzel Washington and Clive Owen.

"Inside Man may be a cat-and-mouse game, but it's far from predictable. What could have been a straightforward thriller is unusually clever, visually captivating and unfailingly entertaining." —Claudia Puig, USA Today

Lee's 2015 reimagining of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes is set in contemporary Chicago. It's an overflowing amalgamation of comedy, musical, and action that follows a group of women led by Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris of Dear White People) who withhold sex in hopes of curbing the city's pervasive violence.

"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." —Olly Richards, Empire

Released on Netflix to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1992 LA riots, this film of Roger Guenveur Smith's one-man show is more a testament to Smith's writing and performance as King than to Lee's direction. Smith, a longtime collaborator of Lee's, mixes King's biography with history, channeling multiple voices throughout the show to paint a complex picture of a tragic life.

"Lee is credited as a director for filming a live performance of Rodney King on an outdoor stage in New York. But Lee mostly seems to have loaned Smith his brand name to get the monologue attention. He doesn't leave a fingerprint on the play, and didn't care about where to put the cameras. The angles make no sense; the edits are clumsy." —Amy Nicholson, MTV News

Lee's film of Roger Guenveur Smith's Obie Award-winning one-man play about the co-founder of the Black Panthers takes place on a stage that feels like a jail, with audience members behind a chain link fence. Lee's directorial hand is felt in the clips and music used to accentuate the riveting performance by Smith, who sits in a chair in the middle of the theater.

"Lee and his top-notch production staff employ camera wizardry and lighting techniques to evocative effect, yet manage to never take away from Smith's performance." —Mark Sachs, Los Angeles Times

The interracial romance between Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra was the provocative selling point of this 1991 release, but Samuel L. Jackson, as Snipes' crack-addicted brother, ends up being the heart of the movie. Jackson was so good, in fact, that the Cannes jury gave him a rare best supporting actor award that year.

"The disparate themes never quite come together, but with many fine performances—John Turturro and Lonette McKee are especially good—you won't be bored for a minute." —Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Shot in 12 days without enough money to finish post-production, Lee's 1986 debut feature, like his future films, bursts with ideas in telling the story of Nola Darling, an independent, artistic woman, and the three men (one being Lee's Mars Blackmon) who want to control her. In 2017, Lee brought the film into contemporary times, adapting it into a well-reviewed TV series for Netflix starring DeWanda Wise as Nola Darling that ran for two seasons.

"Made for less than $30,000, Lee's first feature poses him as a rival to Woody Allen, nearly equaling him in psychological authenticity, perhaps bettering him in virtuosity and sheer creative glee." —Peter Keough, Chicago Reader

Lee has never been afraid of throwing every idea he has about a subject into a single film, and he proved that again with his Vietnam War movie, released on Netflix in 2020. After an initial montage that reads as political, the film shifts into an ensemble dramedy. A war film is introduced, followed by a heist thriller, a father-son melodrama, and eventually a western shoot-em-up. This overabundance gets out of control at times, but the impressive performances by Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters, and especially Delroy Lindo keep the film grounded.

"This is a lobbed grenade. But it's also personal filmmaking at its prodding, profound best. This is a Spike Lee joint and a Spike Lee history lesson. Prepare to be schooled." —Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

For this 2018 release, Lee received the Grand Prix at Cannes and six Oscar nominations, including his first ever for best director and his first competitive win (for the adapted screenplay). John David Washington, Denzel's son, stars as Ron Stallworth, the first Black police officer in Colorado Springs. The film is based on the true story of Stallworth's infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s and finds Lee in impressive control throughout.

"BlacKkKlansman is a furious, funny, blunt and brilliant confrontation with the truth. It's an alarm clock ringing in the midst of a historical nightmare, and also a symphony, the rare piece of political popular art that works in all three dimensions." —A.O. Scott, The New York Times

Released on October 16, 1996, the one-year anniversary of the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., Bus allows an incredible group of actors—Charles S. Dutton, Ossie Davis, Andre Braugher, Roger Guenveur Smith—to showcase their diverse talents. The film is funny and fierce in equal measure, and the only question is how well its time-capsule quality has aged.

"Get on the Bus turns out to be a better movie than Malcolm X. With the road-picture format Lee is free at last - liberated to set his own pace and follow his better instincts" —Jay Boyar, Orlando Sentinel

To capture the electricity of a live show, Lee filmed the last three performances of the Broadway production of this 2008 Tony-award winning musical written by singer/songwriter Stew. The autobiographical story follows a young Black man on his artistic journey from Compton to Europe. Of Lee's theater projects, this one is the most alive. The film opened New York City's IFC Center on August 29, 2009.

"Lee doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel when it comes to filming live theater, but he moves the camera artfully and edits with an energy that matches the music." —Noel Murray, AV Club

Lee's 1997 Academy Award-nominated documentary honors the lives of Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair, who were murder on September 15, 1963 when a bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan exploded in the 16th Street Baptist Church of Birmingham, Alabama. Lee's simple, talking-heads approach has a startling cumulative power.

"Director Spike Lee has made some of the most hard-edged and unsettling American films on racism and its effects. Yet none has been as moving as this." —Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

Lee's four-hour documentary on Katrina and its aftermath is a heartbreaking journey through a tragedy. Lee stays off camera and lets the voices of New Orleans citizens carry the film. Lee's longtime collaborator, New Orleans-born trumpeter Terence Blanchard, supplies the score and appears in the film, returning with his mother and aunt to their flooded home. Levees won multiple awards at the 63rd Venice Film festival as well as a Peabody Award.

"As a film, 'Levees' is a significant and exhaustive achievement. Although it can be argued that it might have been even more effective if it had been edited down a bit, the power of its human stories compensates for whatever minor flaws it has." —David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle

Lee's 1989 masterpiece takes place over one sweltering day in Bed-Stuy. From Rosie Perez's dancing to Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" in the opening credits to the closing quotes by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X, Do the Right Thing burns with originality, wit, anger, and empathy.

"A movie made by filmmaker working in sync with his times -- an exciting, disturbing, provocative film." —Hal Hinson, The Washington Post

After starring in perhaps the greatest concert film of all time, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne made another highly successful journey to the big* screen in 2020 with a Spike Lee-directed film of Byrne's innovative stage show, which finds him performing Talking Heads classics as well as songs from across his solo catalog with the help of a kinetic, untethered backing band. Critics deemed the result euphoric, and a perfect pairing of two accomplished artists.

* At least at the Toronto International Film Festival; most people will only get to see it on the small screen when it debuts October 17 on HBO and HBO Max.

"Lee's knack for distilling the energy of live performance is no secret, for example in his terrific 2009 film of the unconventional Broadway musical Passing Strange. But the synergy here between filmmaker and subject — from the avant-funk grooves to the spirit of inclusivity and the urge to heal a broken nation — is simply spectacular." —David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter