This is an intelligent conversation piece that will certainly not be for all tastes. And yet even its detractors can't deny Lee's compelling flavor.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 18, 2019

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus takes the basic plot of Ganja & Hess, its concerns about addiction, racial identity, and religiosity, and shifts the conversation to focus on the relationship between race, classism, and gender.

| Feb 20, 2019

Spike Lee, the old guard of black indie filmmaking, gets his mojo back with this classy, urbane vampireish art film that is a beauty to behold. Sophisticated, demented, eerie, erotica, prepare to be shocked and flabbergasted.

| Mar 15, 2017

It's a startlingly incompetent film, suggesting that we've reached a point where Lee's instincts as a filmmaker - so unimpeachable a quarter century ago - have abandoned him entirely.

| Jun 18, 2016

Praise God. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is Spike Lee's freest-feeling endeavor in a spell.

| Original Score: A- | Mar 28, 2016

Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a loving adaptation of Bill Gunn's 1973 Ganja & Hess.

| Dec 31, 2015

Lee certainly doesn't schlock things up. But he doesn't add much excitement, either.

| Original Score: C | Jul 14, 2015

Our American addiction...bloodsucking from humanity in order to maintain the lifestyle to which we are accustomed. By the time Hess wearily muses, "I'm tired of this existence," it's more or less clear he means a spiritually empty capitalist existence...

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 27, 2015

An engaging work, one that finds Spike Lee adapting his considerable skills to a new genre. It's not his best movie, but it's definitely one of his most unlikely, and therefore most fascinating.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 25, 2015

"Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" is a bold but wildly uneven, bloody mess of a film, sunk in large part by the subpar performances by nearly every major character in nearly every major role.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5 | Feb 26, 2015

Never once does the film feel sharp on black identity (as did Bill Gunn's original), and the terror is theoretical only.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 20, 2015

Thought-provoking but slow "vampire" movie from Spike Lee.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 20, 2015

The film's execution doesn't serve its subject matter, making it feel more like an affected thesis than an effective work of art.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Feb 19, 2015

A curio that will likely only appeal to Spike Lee's most devoted fans - or those that contributed to the Kickstarter campaign that financed it.

| Original Score: 3/10 | Feb 17, 2015

It's clear Lee has some inexplicable love for the source material but he doesn't give us any reason to feel the same way.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Feb 16, 2015

... an audacious but muddled character study that nevertheless proves the veteran filmmaker can never be easily dismissed.

| Feb 13, 2015

The film is a hypnotically nightmarish mood piece more than anything else; it makes sense and yet doesn't make sense, in the way that dreams do and don't make sense.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 13, 2015

Spike Lee makes some interesting creative choices, but his film lacks a pulse.

| Original Score: C | Feb 13, 2015

Unrepentant, uneven and unique, "Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" proves that Lee can still make a film worthy of the arguments it will most certainly start.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 13, 2015

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a mess, but it's the kind of mess only one of our greatest filmmakers could make.

| Feb 13, 2015