Every One-of-a-Kind Spike Lee Movie, Ranked

Lee’s forgotten war film charts four Buffalo Soldiers who camp out in a Tuscan village during the Italian campaign of World War II. Miracle at St. Anna eagerly confronts the racist contradictions of America’s noble myth of saving Europe from the Nazis, but the inclusion of Italian partisan morality, magical realism, and a mystery framing device set in 1980s New York overstuffs the narrative to the point of depleting the film’s pulse. Whenever Miracle isn’t fighting back against the traditions of the American war genre, it conforms to tired cliches.

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This crowdfunded remake of the revolutionary ‘70s vampire film Ganja & Hess is an eccentric but sluggish look at desire and dependence, set primarily in Martha’s Vineyard. Lee maintains the original film’s focus on anthropology (the wealthy academic Dr. Hess becomes a bloodsucker after being stabbed by an ancient Ashanti ceremonial dagger) and there are threads of social commentary and religious symbolism in his updated version. But a head-turning soundtrack of unsigned artists can’t make this retread sharp and strange enough to recommend.

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Spike Lee’s chronicling of Brooklyn, New York may go down as his greatest contribution to American cinema, but this low-budget coming-of-age film set in Brooklyn’s Red Hook housing complexes lacks the excitement and sophistication of hits like Do the Right Thing, Crooklyn, or Clockers. Simply put, the perspective of a Baptist minister’s young grandson spending the summer in his Red Hook parish isn’t very interesting. Lee neglects his arresting cinematic style for most of the bloated two hour runtime—except for when the film takes a dark and unpleasant turn, and a pre-breakout Colman Domingo becomes the subject of one of Lee’s most memorable dolly shots. Since Lee’s dollies are defining filmmaking flourish, this is a big achievement.

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Credit to Lee: even when his films have little wit, edge, or brevity, he’ll make enough peculiar choices to raise an eyebrow. In this sex comedy, Anthony Mackie plays an executive ousted from his Big Pharma company who secures a lucrative new gig as the sperm donor for his ex-fiancée (Kerry Washington), her girlfriend, and their lesbian friends. Cue Mackie’s face composited onto a fleet of sperm, which sits alongside a Godfather-quoting Mafia don (John Turturro), a Bush-era senate inquiry, and a heartfelt tribute to Frank Wills, the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in.

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It may be surprising to rank Lee’s big mainstream comeback and only Oscar winner so low on this list, but while this larger-than-life story of a Black cop going undercover with the Ku Klux Klan is a tense, entertaining drama, it suffers from turning an uncomfortable history into a victory for ‘70s cops (as elaborated by filmmaker Boots Riley in 2018). The film is full of dark and scathing humor about how the Klan views itself and tries to evolve for modern times, but BlacKkKlansman is more effective as a vessel for Lee’s anger at Trump’s revival of far-right racism than as coherent commentary of white supremacy and policing in America.

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Want to know why Samuel L. Jackson played Uncle Sam in Kendrick Lamar’s Superbowl halftime show? It’s a homage to Chi-Raq, where Jackson played the equivalent of a Greek chorus in an adaptation of Lysistrata. Lee updated the play’s setting from the Trojan War to modern Chicago, where gang violence motivates Southside women to hold a sex strike until peace is declared. Lee’s usual problems are here in spades–incompatible tones, crass comedy, gender stereotypes, so many storylines–but the combination of a staggering cast and the novelty of verse dialogue gives us a blistering and unique entry in his filmography.

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Flipper (Wesley Snipes) is a successful family man whose interracial affair with his white secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra) sends shockwaves through both his Harlem community and her prejudiced Italian American family. Jungle Fever is less about transgressive love as it is about family; The film is full of marginalized New York parents who believe that their children contradicting their values is a personal attack. A lot of Jungle Fever’s messiness adds to the appeal (the much-memed ending is both ludicrous and sincere) but Lee’s desire to depict so much social violence and neglect at such a fever pitch undermines the film’s insightful qualities.

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With his first Netflix film, Lee doubled down on the injustice of Black veterans exploited by the American war machine, telling the story of Vietnam soldiers who return to their battlefield to recover stolen gold. Featuring one of Chadwick Boseman’s final performances before he died, Da 5 Bloods is an uneven but venomous look at the long-term wounds of imperialism, packed with political contradictions and too-brief observations on a country recovering from American intervention. Still, Lee’s camera and star Delroy Lindo are a match made in heaven–wearing a MAGA hat, the actor channels the cruelty and paranoia of someone who’s been left behind by a nation that’s extracted so much from him.

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Future Game of Thrones showrunner David Benioff adapted his own novel for this New York melodrama about the final 24 hours of freedom for convicted drug dealer Monty (Edward Norton). Lee does an admirable job with a broad and provocative script, livening some juvenile material with frenetic visuals and an animated cast. This story of a New Yorker’s conflicted sense of belonging was retooled in pre-production to reflect the city in the immediate aftermath of 9/11–the scene where Monty’s two best friends argue over his future has an added sense of unease and tragedy because the real life Ground Zero fills up the background.

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Spike Lee’s filmography is an evolving encyclopedia of Black athleticism, channeling his passion for sport and memorabilia (as well as courtside trash-talking) into easter eggs and asides about iconic track stars, batters, ballers–and especially his treasured New York Knicks. Here, Denzel Washington is Jake Shuttlesworth, an incarcerated father who’s released on parole to convince Jesus, his estranged prodigy son, to play for the prison governor’s former college. As Jesus, Lee cast then-Milwaukee Bucks player Ray Allen–the athlete had the unenviable task of sharing scenes with the greatest actor Spike has ever worked with. The film suffers when Jake and Jesus aren’t confronting each other (or their demons) on-screen, but even Spike and Denzel’s weakest collab has a lot to love. It’s a coming-of-age story about forgiveness and love of the game.

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Lee’s debut feature is one of the coolest calling cards in American cinema–a counter-cultural treatise on love and identity centered on Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a Brooklynite whose polyamory confounds her insecure male partners. With talking heads, musical interludes, and a restless editing rhythm, She’s Gotta Have It stuffs itself with as many fiery, stubborn perspectives as possible as the men in Nola’s life come to terms with her modern principles. The problem with She’s Gotta Have It is that Nola’s three competing suitors–an intellectual, a model, and a lil stinker (played by Lee)–threaten to eclipse Nola in her own story, and she only takes charge of the story in the final act.

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Reuniting Spike Lee and Denzel Washington demands top-tier material, and reimagining Akira Kurosawa’s class-conscious kidnapping saga High & Low to focus on a New York record label boss is an apt, inspired choice. Highest 2 Lowest’s sleepy opening act teases its reflections on the stubborn egos of wealthy Black artists; thankfully, the film erupts with a ransom drop sequence that incorporates chants of Yankee pride with the sounds of a Puerto Rican Day Parade. With Denzel fully locked in, the film–which feels cannily reflective of how the aging Lee and Washington perceive themselves–builds to a recording booth confrontation (co-starring A$AP Rocky, no less) that articulates why director and star were made for each other.

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There’s a clash at the college–at the historical Black Atlanta college Mission College, student Dap (Laurence Fishburne) pressures the faculty to divest from apartheid South Africa, opposing not just the donor-conscious school board but a cultish fraternity led by Julian (Giancarlo Esposito). Lee’s second film is full of sparky performances and musical numbers, with dozens of topical issues and tensions (including colorism, hazing, and classism) driving the feuding students towards sudden, necessary clarity. School Daze resonates as a depiction of going to school during significant historical moments, where serious political divides sit alongside trivial interpersonal grievances.

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Lee’s drama about the personal strife of a jazz trumpeter is significant for many reasons: It was his first film after his seismic Do the Right Thing, it kicked off his historic ‘90s run, and it marked the first collaboration between Lee and Denzel Washington, who plays Bleek Gilliam, an up-and-coming musician with plenty of charisma, integrity, and ego. In his early run, Lee embraced the swells of melodrama, telegraphing big emotions with music, color, and big camera moves. As loud and uneven as Mo’ Better Blues can feel (including Spike’s much-criticized characterization of Jewish music execs), there’s a piercing intimacy to Bleek’s pain and penance that signals how Denzel and Spike would eventually bring out the best in each other.

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Inside Man is a lesson in how Lee’s singular rhythms are perfectly suited to commercial fare, even if he’s a director-for-hire. Denzel is an NYPD hostage negotiator tasked with thwarting a bank heist on Wall Street led by a righteous master thief (Clive Owen). Inside Man is punchy, gripping, and on the right side of ludicrous–Lee taps into the innate New York mentality of screenwriter Russell Gewirtz’s script, with characters who instinctively know how the city operates. They’re experts on mundane, municipal details but also clued up on corruption and influence in the city; In Lee’s hands, every flavor of New York tension emerges as the hostage crisis worsens.

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A sprawling ensemble drama set during the summer of 1977 in the Italian neighborhoods of the Bronx, Lee keeps the “Son of Sam” murders in the background and hones in on the disorder and paranoia that emerged as a consequence, starring John Leguizamo as a philandering hairdresser and Adrien Brody as a local oddball obsessed with British punk culture. It’s messy, erotic, and pitched solely at a high volume, embracing the tragic, debaucherous, and trashy qualities of melodrama–it ranks among Lee’s most excessive and abrasive films, but for Lee, that can be a good thing. What’s more sizzling than Vinny and his long-suffering wife Dionna (Mira Sorvino) hitting the dance floor?

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This road movie about fifteen Black men traveling from Los Angeles to Washington, DC to attend the historic 1995 Million Man March was funded completely independently (investors included Danny Glover, Will Smith, and Johnnie Cochran). Filmed mostly on the moving bus with a more economic style than Lee’s previous work, Get on the Bus is a sharp reminder of the director’s gift with actors. The cast (including Ossie Davis, Isaiah Washington, and Andre Braugher) have a combative chemistry, ably portraying the passengers’s contradictions as they approach a highly symbolic destination that calls for unified, empathetic solidarity.

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If Lee’s other 1996 film was about fraternity, this dramedy about Judy (Theresa Randle), a young actress who becomes a phone sex operator, has the strongest feminist undercurrent of a Spike Lee joint since his debut She’s Gotta Have It. In fact, Girl 6 opens with Judy auditioning with Nola’s opening monologue (to Quentin Tarantino, no less). With a script by future Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks, Girl 6 satirizes the entertainment and adult industries as similarly sleazy. Even though the film’s treatment of sex work feature a few regressive tropes, it centers Judy’s need for agency and sorority within the punishing confines of the patriarchy. A sexy, vibrant, and moving gem in Lee’s world-class ‘90s run.

Girl 6 is currently unavailable to stream or buy on physical media.

Originally Martin Scorsese was attached to direct this crime drama that focuses on young drug dealers (or, “clockers”) from Brooklyn housing projects who work for a menacing drug lord (Delroy Lindo). When a fast food manager is murdered, two Homicide detectives (Harvey Keitel and John Turturro) investigate the dealers, and Lee uses his expansive and emotional style (in his first collaboration with cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed) to underline the helplessness of the young men in systems that throttle their agency and work against their escape. It’s a noir-tinged crime story that feels electric and tragic in Lee’s hands; an aching, maddening portrait of being walled in.

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