A tough and thoughtful movie from Spike Lee.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 29, 2024

Spike Lee’s most sorrowful film. It’s a devastating depiction of a community poisoning itself.

| Aug 20, 2023

For all its flash and agitated rhythms, Clockers has the thoughtful down time that allows actors to act and the narrative to hold its course.

| Dec 27, 2022

Clockers was years ahead of its time. It’s a visceral crime film that gives us a powerful look at the urban drug trade and the bleak despair of escaping your circumstances while exploring race relations between the police and the community they serve.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 16, 2022

Clockers is of its time and now feels slightly dated because of it... But it remains a well-crafted crime drama and feels real and true enough to still hit close to home.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 2, 2021

Clockers is a tremendous film -- and a major addition to the work of a vibrantly talented director.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 19, 2021

With Clockers, director Spike Lee achieves his best work so far.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 18, 2021

A story told with mournful, epic vision that rises high above its grim setting.

| Apr 9, 2020

''Clockers'' remains a major work by a major film artist, but its cinematic achievements are diminished by its narrative and psychological shortcomings.

| Apr 9, 2020

In many ways, it's better than the book it's taken from: tighter, tauter, with a deeper vein of sadness opening underneath.

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

Strong performances, edgy dialogue and Lee's success in luring an audience into his own tempo and urgent perspective make Clockers tough stuff, indeed.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 9, 2020

What all but sinks Clockers is its muddled script, an indulgent mess that is by turns dull and disorienting.

| Apr 9, 2020

This harrowing portrait of a young, ulcer- ridden, low-level drug dealer, or "clocker," adds up to the director's best film since "Do the Right Thing."

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

"Clockers" is as grim as it is good. This is not an"entertaining" popcorn- type movie. It's timely. It's tragic in many ways. And it leaves a provocative and lasting impression.

| Apr 9, 2020

Lee and Price make sure the piece sufficiently addresses such issues as the devastating effect that criminals have on their own communities and the roles that both cops and crooks can play in tandem with each other.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 15, 2020

Clockers may be Lee's strongest film since Do the Right Thing, but he runs into trouble at the end when he tries to tie up all his threads in neat bows...the passion of this raw, mournful urban epic remains in spite of the false moves.

| Feb 26, 2018

There's no denying the movie's greatness: the depth of the characters, the urgency of its narrative, the nightmarishness of its vision.

| Aug 16, 2016

Clockers leaves you with a sense of aching sadness, a regretful melancholy for the lives that have been blasted and the wrong decisions that have been made. Once again, Spike Lee has done the right thing.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 18, 2014

Lee has jettisoned most of his trademark technical razzmatazz; it's as if he were trying to burn straight through to the heart of his material.

| Original Score: A | Sep 7, 2011

Lee's film never recaptures the impact of the opening credit sequence, a grimly deglamorized tableaux of real-life crime scenes.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 22, 2008