Spike Lee will remain a leader in cinematic cultural commentary but that very potency was less present in BlacKkKlansman. While the messaging is still assured and deliberate, perhaps this film is set to the temperature of those in need of it.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 26, 2025

No one does it like Spike. BlacKkKlansman is sharp, powerful, and unapologetic. The sudden kumbayah felt too neat, but John David Washington is flawless. The messaging is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Spike—Black is beautiful, Black is powerful.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 26, 2025

Spike Lee’s power is on full display in his film BlacKkKlansman, a gut-punch comedy drama that uses the past to critique the present (and possibly future).

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 27, 2024

It becomes painfully and chillingly obvious how relevant so much of the film’s commentary is, as Lee parallels “old America” to its current state of affairs through appropriate storytelling.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 11, 2024

It took Spike Lee to bring it all together and make us laugh and cry but also make us think...

| Apr 4, 2024

Spike Lee's films aren’t paychecks. They are passion projects in every sense.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 16, 2024

BlacKKKlansman is an outright pleasure for those interested in race, politics and cinema all at once.

| Oct 17, 2023

“BlacKkKlansman” is a skillfully guised epic, far grander in scale than it may appear on the surface. It’s a film rich with metaphors and juxtapositions which we experience through the two main characters, both of whom are carving out their own identities

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 19, 2022

When Spike Lee’s upside-down American flag (sign of distress) turns to black and white then fades away, the curtain is pulled back on his audience. His latest is darkly funny while still packing some walloping emotional punches along the way.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 17, 2022

Lee's most purely entertaining film since Inside Man in 2006, BlacKkKlansman has a timeliness that taps into an imperative national conversation.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 11, 2022

Spike Lee will always be one of America's foremost filmmakers; an explosive auteur with a jarring left hook who sizes up society and social issues with Billy Wilder's wit and Old Testament fury.

| Feb 11, 2022

Perhaps Spike's broadest and most well layered joint.

| Original Score: 80/100 | Aug 27, 2021

If it had been more artistically rigorous with the slapstick, it could have arrived at Arendt's 'banality of evil', and taken that point home with guns blazing.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 30, 2021

Blackkklansman helps Spike Lee finally land in the Best Director field where he deserved a place years ago.

| Jul 22, 2021

Spike Lee has much more than a roomful of people for his audience and this is his fiery speech.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 28, 2021

Terrific performances and fearless storytelling make BlacKkKlansman a searing document that defies the viewer not to react.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 4, 2021

Spike Lee definitely knows how to land a punch.

| Feb 18, 2021

Well timed for anniversary of white nationalist march in Charlottesville where activist Heather Heyer was killed, Lee doesn't shy away from linking the past and the present this unsubtly and directly, like no other major American filmmaker.

| Feb 13, 2021

Devoted to the politics of race and blood, Lee is obliged to present a version of events largely existing outside actual history. Instead, we are offered history as the record of the beauty or emanation of the race.

| Feb 11, 2021

BlacKkKlansman may be set 40 years in the past but it's made for the America of today.

| Dec 8, 2020