Bamboozled exists to serve as a reminder that the message will always be raw with Spike Lee and he is the King of Satire.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 18, 2025

Bamboozled starts bold & fearless, delivering a sharp satirical punch. Spike Lee crafts a rightfully polarising, vital commentary on race & media.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 18, 2025

Even if Lee's only intent with Bamboozled was to ignite fiery discourse about race and representation in entertainment, his film remains a rousing achievement as both art and a social prompt.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 14, 2022

Although the script gets away from Lee in certain parts, there are several delicious, hilarious, and thought-provoking layers to the story that continue to resonate.

| Dec 9, 2021

The initial shock of Bamboozled's blackface revival gives way to melancholic revelation, conjured from the history of cinema.

| Sep 16, 2020

As Nicolas Roeg wrote in his 2013 memoir The World is Ever Changing, "You should make films for the future -- if you do that, the audience will catch up with you, eventually." Lee made a film which touches on the past, present and future.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 31, 2020

It works overtime to throw the audience off balance, to alienate us in almost Brechtian fashion, holding us at arm's length but demanding our attention as if saying "don't look away, you need to see this."

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 9, 2020

Audacious, vibrant, unsurprisingly maligned but frequently brilliant.

| Mar 23, 2020

Believe it or not, Bamboozled is a comedy, even if a dark one. Lee makes sure that there are plenty of laughs, even if he's poking the audience at the same time to wonder why they are laughing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 22, 2020

Bamboozled is both outrageous and outraged, with some bitter laughs strewn throughout. But the final act is ugly and unconvincing.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 21, 2020

It may not be very subtle but it is very funny, confrontational and thought-provoking throughout.

| Mar 20, 2020

Bamboozled does more to really hit audiences in the face with challenging messages, and a specific look that certainly seems untraditional.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Mar 17, 2020

Spike Lee's sharp, riotous satire, from 2000, zeroes in on the grotesque misrepresentation of blacks in American media-and their underrepresentation in the corporate offices that control it.

| Oct 26, 2015

Provocative Spike Lee movie for older teens.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 23, 2010

Lee, in his least commercial film, shoots for controversy but loses focus.

| Original Score: C | Jun 8, 2009

This is basically sloppy, all-over-the-map filmmaking with few hints of self-criticism and few genuine laughs.

| Sep 23, 2008

Spike Lee's shotgun attack on the treatment of blacks in television and the blurring of image and identity is a brilliant rant that digresses into repetitive sermonizing.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 7, 2008

A particularly painful mess, because it begins so well and has such promise.

| Original Score: C- | Jul 23, 2007

If Mr. Lee meant to bring back blackface entertainment as a metaphor for the current black performers he finds obnoxious, he has miscalculated.

| Apr 27, 2007

...where most of us in his audience will lean forward to hear a whisper, we turn away from a shout. Oh, how Bamboozled shouts.

| Apr 6, 2006