Category: Blog

Some of the things we encounter every day feel so ordinary that we rarely stop to think about what they might contain or cause. Yet everyday environments can expose people to substances and conditions that carry real health risks, sometimes without any obvious warning. A recent Reddit discussion about common carcinogens brought up everything from radon and air pollution to chemicals found in familiar places. The subject is unsettling because many of these risks are easy to overlook precisely because they are part of normal life. Understanding the risk does not mean living in fear, but it can make certain habits and surroundings worth paying closer attention to.

The post 15 Every Day Things Nobody Knows Are Killing Them appeared first on Den of Geek.

Spike Lee demanded immediate attention with his 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, and filmgoers have not been able to look away since. Not only has Lee established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers in cinema history—known for signatures such as his double dolly shot and declaring each work “A Spike Lee Joint”—but he’s continued to innovate, pushing the form forward even 40 years into his career.

With so many entries in his filmography, ranking Spike Lee will always be a daunting task. And to help, we are just looking at his narrative features, which excludes some incredible documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke) and great concert films (The Original Kings of Comedy, American Utopia). From those features, here are the 10 most formally exhilarating, thematically challenging, and ultimately unabashedly human works from this modern American virtuoso.

10. BlackKklansman (2018)

BlackKkKlansman finally gave Lee the Oscars attention he had long deserved, with six nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s not hard to see why this was the movie that mainstream institutions decided to award, and not just because it boasts a producing credit from Jordan Peele. BlackKklansman tells an irresistible true story about a Black police officer (John David Washington) who with the help of his Jewish partner (Adam Driver) goes undercover to infiltrate the KKK in 1970s Colorado Springs.

Most directors would take the opportunity to turn in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but not Lee. Instead he uses BlackKklansman as an opportunity to comment on the relationship between popular culture and American racism, from an opening that features Alec Baldwin playing a racist choking on his rhetoric while Gone With the Wind projects behind him to a formally thrilling sequence in which enpratued Black faces dissolve onto the screen to punctuate a speech by Black Panther Kwame Ture (an electric Corey Hawkins) about Black beauty. 

9. He Got Game (1998)

Akira Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune. Martin Scorsese has Robert De Niro, and Spike Lee found his perfect muse in Denzel Washington. Washington, of course, is one of the greatest actors of his generation and has done excellent work with a variety of filmmakers. But time and again, he’s proven himself perfectly suited to embodying sometimes contradictory emotions, playing ragged and cool at the same time, often while maintaining a sense of humor. And with the basketball drama He Got Game, Lee gives Washington one of his most complicated characters.

In He Got Game, Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth, whose son Jesus (played by Jade Yorker as a boy and by NBA star Ray Allen as an adult) is on the verge of a starting a phenomenal college basketball career, sure to lead to professional stardom. Hoping to sway Jesus’ decision toward the local state university, the governor has released Jake from prison where he’s been serving a sentence for killing Jesus’ mother. Despite the messy political and legal entanglements that set up the story, He Got Game tells a rich and complicated tale about family ties and the possibilities of forgiveness, all anchored by Washington bringing humanity to a troubling person.

8. Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Music has always been a major part of Lee’s movies, from the rich Terence Blanchard scores that fill most of his movies to pop music inserts, such as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” opening Do the Right Thing. So it’s no surprise that one of Lee’s best movies would put the focus on musicians, namely the members of the jazz combo the Bleek Quintet, led by trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Washington). The Quintet starts the fracture when saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes) begins demanding more attention, and problems with girlfriends cause tensions between the members. It’s all noise that threatens to disrupt the music.

Mo’ Better Blues revisits some of Lee’s favorite themes, including the spiritual nature of art and the inability of men and women to communicate with one another. Yet the pairing of Washington and Snipes infuses those themes with a new energy, as does the fact that the movie focuses on artists themselves. Rarely has Lee made himself so present in his work, not so much in his character, the Bleek Quintet’s manager Giant, but in the struggles of artists trying to make their way throughout society.

7. Inside Man (2006)

Here’s the shocking thing about Spike Lee: yes, he’s an incredible stylist with a clear, unmistakable voice, but he’s also a perfect blockbuster filmmaker. In another world, Lee could have just devoted himself to making big budget movies about cops and robbers doing exciting adventures. Instead he just occasionally reminds us what an effective crowd-pleaser he can be by occasionally doing straightforward genre pieces like Inside Man.

Inside Man begins with a delicious caper hook, in which detective Keith Frazier (Washington) and his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) try to defuse a hostage situation that arises when criminal Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his team rob a bank. From that starting point, Inside Man unfolds a twisty narrative about war criminals and dirty secrets, complete with appearances by stars such as Willem Dafoe, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer. In the end, Inside Man isn’t a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster; it’s a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster of the highest quality.

6. School Daze (1988)

Although it doesn’t happen until the very end of his second feature, Spike Lee properly arrives as an artist when Dap (Laurence Fishburne) looks directly at the camera and shouts to the audience, “Please, wake up!” The fact that the militant Dap gets the last word in School Daze underscores the importance of his worldview for the movie. But School Daze has room for a range of personalities and perspectives, making it one of Lee’s most vibrant entries, setting the stage for the often messy but always exhilarating work he’d do throughout his career.

School Daze takes place at the Atlanta HBCU Mission College, a fictional stand in for Lee’s own alma mater Morehouse College. While Dap tries to draw attention to South African apartheid, his classmates focus their attention on more collegiate concerns. For Half-Pint (Lee), that means pledging in the Gamma Phi Gamma; for the fraternity president Dean Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito), that means keeping a low profile; meanwhile others like Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) deal with issues of beauty standards and colorism. Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama, and sometimes a musical, School Daze gives plenty of attention to the varieties of human experience, making Dap’s closing plea all the more urgent.

5. Jungle Fever (1991)

On the surface, Jungle Fever plays like an average upper-middle-class drama, the sort of thing that Hollywood has been producing for centuries. Wesley Snipes portrays architect Flipper Purify, who lives a quiet life with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee) and their daughter, despite his frustrations with bosses who won’t advance his career. When Flipper begins an affair with his new secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra), he faces judgment from his friends and family, not the least of which includes his respected father, the Good Reverend Doctor Purify (Ossie Davis).

However, Lee uses that plot to explore assumptions about race, as Flipper and Angie’s respective friend and family groups object less to the fact of an affair than they do the fact that Flipper is Black and Angie is white. As the film’s title suggests, Jungle Fever doesn’t shy away from the cultural forces that influence our perceptions and desires. Instead it allows the viewers to sit in the various discomforts raised by Flipper and Angie’s relationship, making Jungle Fever a unique addition to Hollywood’s love affair with love affairs.

4. Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee is as much a student of cinema as he is a filmmaker, and he often works references to classic movies into his own projects. Unsurprisingly, Da 5 Bloods does feature nods to war flicks like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. However, it finds most inspiration in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as it follows a group of four Vietnam veterans—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—and Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) returning to Vietnam to find gold bars they buried during the war.

Old grudges and past hurt resurface as the men make their way to the treasure. And at the center of it all is their one missing member, their leader Stormin’ Norman Earl Holloway, who was killed in action and is played by Chadwick Boseman. Having already portrayed historical figures such as James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall, to say nothing of the superhero Black Panther, Boseman comes to the role well-suited to play a legendary soldier. That quality only intensified with Boseman’s shocking death, mere months after the release of Da 5 Bloods.

3. 25th Hour (2002)

In the 25 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, many movies have tried to capture that surreal moment of fear and fragile community. None have done it better than the first proper post-9/11 movie, 25th Hour. Although the film only occasionally references the attacks, having already been in pre-production on Sept. 11, it displays a self-destructive nation full of anger against itself, which refuses to accept its diversity, even as it realizes that diversity has always been a part of it.

Based on the novel by David Benioff, who wrote the screenplay and would later be half of Game of Thrones showrunning duo, 25th Hour stars Edward Norton as small-time drug dealer Monty Brogan. Busted for possession, Monty has one last day before he must report to prison, which he chooses to spend with his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), and his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper), an aggressive stock trader, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a private school English teacher. As he considers leaving the city for good, or spending the next seven years in Hell, Monty must face everything he loves and hates about America in general and New York City in particular, culminating a visceral monologue that is among the best scenes in Lee’s career.

2. Malcolm X (1992)

Only Spike Lee could make a Hollywood biopic about Malcom X. That was especially true in 1992 when most of America still found his message too painful to consider. Yet Lee had not only the sway to get Warner Bros. to fund the picture (often by forcing the studio’s hand, following tactics he learned from his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola), but had the vision to ensure that the picture was faithful Malcolm X’s story. Moreover, only Lee had the filmmaking chops to turn the life of Malcom X into an epic and, it must be said, entertaining movie.

Of course, it helps that Lee had his greatest collaborator Denzel Washington in the lead, an actor capable of moving past the icon to find the human being. Co-written by Lee and Arnold Perl, themselves following The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the film traces Malcom Little’s days as a hustler living in Boston during World War II to his conversion to Islam after meeting Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) to becoming the Civil Rights leader we know today. Despite coming in at more than three and a half hours, Malcom X plays like old-school Hollywood spectacle without sacrificing any of the power of the man’s message.

1. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee has never stopped innovating and experimenting. Still, there’s no denying that one of his earliest movies remains his greatest: 1989’s Do the Right Thing. The story of tensions breaking in a Brooklyn neighborhood during an extremely hot day, Do the Right Thing demonstrates everything great about Lee as a filmmaker: his formal restlessness, his love of classic Hollywood, his fearless depiction of American racism, and his interest in communal life.

Lee takes the starring role as Mookie, a young man who supports the son he has with his girlfiend Tina (Rosie Perez) by delivering pizzas for Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello). As Mookie makes his deliveries and deals with the heat, always serenaded by the records played by the all-seeing DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), he encounters all manner of citizen, including the high-strung Buggin’ Out (Esposito), Sal’s racist son Pino (John Turturro), the mysterious Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and older on again/ff again couple Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Davis). Lee draws the characters with such love that the movie’s explosion of violence at the end still feels inevitable, heartbreaking, and necessary, all these years later.

The post The 10 Best Spike Lee Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Some movie scenes are designed to make audiences cry, gasp, or sit in complete silence, yet something about them ends up being unintentionally hilarious. It might be an awkward line reading, a strange visual detail, an overly dramatic reaction, or simply a moment that has aged in a way nobody could have predicted. Once viewers notice the funny side, it can become impossible to watch the scene the same way again. Directors and actors may have been completely serious, but audiences have a talent for finding comedy in the most unexpected places. These are the moments that were meant to be dramatic, terrifying, or emotional and somehow became unforgettable for a completely different reason.

The post 13 Movie Moments That Were Never Supposed to Be Funny appeared first on Den of Geek.

Spike Lee demanded immediate attention with his 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, and filmgoers have not been able to look away since. Not only has Lee established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers in cinema history—known for signatures such as his double dolly shot and declaring each work “A Spike Lee Joint”—but he’s continued to innovate, pushing the form forward even 40 years into his career.

With so many entries in his filmography, ranking Spike Lee will always be a daunting task. And to help, we are just looking at his narrative features, which excludes some incredible documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke) and great concert films (The Original Kings of Comedy, American Utopia). From those features, here are the 10 most formally exhilarating, thematically challenging, and ultimately unabashedly human works from this modern American virtuoso.

10. BlackKklansman (2018)

BlackKkKlansman finally gave Lee the Oscars attention he had long deserved, with six nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s not hard to see why this was the movie that mainstream institutions decided to award, and not just because it boasts a producing credit from Jordan Peele. BlackKklansman tells an irresistible true story about a Black police officer (John David Washington) who with the help of his Jewish partner (Adam Driver) goes undercover to infiltrate the KKK in 1970s Colorado Springs.

Most directors would take the opportunity to turn in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but not Lee. Instead he uses BlackKklansman as an opportunity to comment on the relationship between popular culture and American racism, from an opening that features Alec Baldwin playing a racist choking on his rhetoric while Gone With the Wind projects behind him to a formally thrilling sequence in which enpratued Black faces dissolve onto the screen to punctuate a speech by Black Panther Kwame Ture (an electric Corey Hawkins) about Black beauty. 

9. He Got Game (1998)

Akira Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune. Martin Scorsese has Robert De Niro, and Spike Lee found his perfect muse in Denzel Washington. Washington, of course, is one of the greatest actors of his generation and has done excellent work with a variety of filmmakers. But time and again, he’s proven himself perfectly suited to embodying sometimes contradictory emotions, playing ragged and cool at the same time, often while maintaining a sense of humor. And with the basketball drama He Got Game, Lee gives Washington one of his most complicated characters.

In He Got Game, Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth, whose son Jesus (played by Jade Yorker as a boy and by NBA star Ray Allen as an adult) is on the verge of a starting a phenomenal college basketball career, sure to lead to professional stardom. Hoping to sway Jesus’ decision toward the local state university, the governor has released Jake from prison where he’s been serving a sentence for killing Jesus’ mother. Despite the messy political and legal entanglements that set up the story, He Got Game tells a rich and complicated tale about family ties and the possibilities of forgiveness, all anchored by Washington bringing humanity to a troubling person.

8. Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Music has always been a major part of Lee’s movies, from the rich Terence Blanchard scores that fill most of his movies to pop music inserts, such as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” opening Do the Right Thing. So it’s no surprise that one of Lee’s best movies would put the focus on musicians, namely the members of the jazz combo the Bleek Quintet, led by trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Washington). The Quintet starts the fracture when saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes) begins demanding more attention, and problems with girlfriends cause tensions between the members. It’s all noise that threatens to disrupt the music.

Mo’ Better Blues revisits some of Lee’s favorite themes, including the spiritual nature of art and the inability of men and women to communicate with one another. Yet the pairing of Washington and Snipes infuses those themes with a new energy, as does the fact that the movie focuses on artists themselves. Rarely has Lee made himself so present in his work, not so much in his character, the Bleek Quintet’s manager Giant, but in the struggles of artists trying to make their way throughout society.

7. Inside Man (2006)

Here’s the shocking thing about Spike Lee: yes, he’s an incredible stylist with a clear, unmistakable voice, but he’s also a perfect blockbuster filmmaker. In another world, Lee could have just devoted himself to making big budget movies about cops and robbers doing exciting adventures. Instead he just occasionally reminds us what an effective crowd-pleaser he can be by occasionally doing straightforward genre pieces like Inside Man.

Inside Man begins with a delicious caper hook, in which detective Keith Frazier (Washington) and his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) try to defuse a hostage situation that arises when criminal Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his team rob a bank. From that starting point, Inside Man unfolds a twisty narrative about war criminals and dirty secrets, complete with appearances by stars such as Willem Dafoe, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer. In the end, Inside Man isn’t a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster; it’s a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster of the highest quality.

6. School Daze (1988)

Although it doesn’t happen until the very end of his second feature, Spike Lee properly arrives as an artist when Dap (Laurence Fishburne) looks directly at the camera and shouts to the audience, “Please, wake up!” The fact that the militant Dap gets the last word in School Daze underscores the importance of his worldview for the movie. But School Daze has room for a range of personalities and perspectives, making it one of Lee’s most vibrant entries, setting the stage for the often messy but always exhilarating work he’d do throughout his career.

School Daze takes place at the Atlanta HBCU Mission College, a fictional stand in for Lee’s own alma mater Morehouse College. While Dap tries to draw attention to South African apartheid, his classmates focus their attention on more collegiate concerns. For Half-Pint (Lee), that means pledging in the Gamma Phi Gamma; for the fraternity president Dean Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito), that means keeping a low profile; meanwhile others like Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) deal with issues of beauty standards and colorism. Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama, and sometimes a musical, School Daze gives plenty of attention to the varieties of human experience, making Dap’s closing plea all the more urgent.

5. Jungle Fever (1991)

On the surface, Jungle Fever plays like an average upper-middle-class drama, the sort of thing that Hollywood has been producing for centuries. Wesley Snipes portrays architect Flipper Purify, who lives a quiet life with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee) and their daughter, despite his frustrations with bosses who won’t advance his career. When Flipper begins an affair with his new secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra), he faces judgment from his friends and family, not the least of which includes his respected father, the Good Reverend Doctor Purify (Ossie Davis).

However, Lee uses that plot to explore assumptions about race, as Flipper and Angie’s respective friend and family groups object less to the fact of an affair than they do the fact that Flipper is Black and Angie is white. As the film’s title suggests, Jungle Fever doesn’t shy away from the cultural forces that influence our perceptions and desires. Instead it allows the viewers to sit in the various discomforts raised by Flipper and Angie’s relationship, making Jungle Fever a unique addition to Hollywood’s love affair with love affairs.

4. Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee is as much a student of cinema as he is a filmmaker, and he often works references to classic movies into his own projects. Unsurprisingly, Da 5 Bloods does feature nods to war flicks like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. However, it finds most inspiration in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as it follows a group of four Vietnam veterans—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—and Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) returning to Vietnam to find gold bars they buried during the war.

Old grudges and past hurt resurface as the men make their way to the treasure. And at the center of it all is their one missing member, their leader Stormin’ Norman Earl Holloway, who was killed in action and is played by Chadwick Boseman. Having already portrayed historical figures such as James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall, to say nothing of the superhero Black Panther, Boseman comes to the role well-suited to play a legendary soldier. That quality only intensified with Boseman’s shocking death, mere months after the release of Da 5 Bloods.

3. 25th Hour (2002)

In the 25 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, many movies have tried to capture that surreal moment of fear and fragile community. None have done it better than the first proper post-9/11 movie, 25th Hour. Although the film only occasionally references the attacks, having already been in pre-production on Sept. 11, it displays a self-destructive nation full of anger against itself, which refuses to accept its diversity, even as it realizes that diversity has always been a part of it.

Based on the novel by David Benioff, who wrote the screenplay and would later be half of Game of Thrones showrunning duo, 25th Hour stars Edward Norton as small-time drug dealer Monty Brogan. Busted for possession, Monty has one last day before he must report to prison, which he chooses to spend with his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), and his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper), an aggressive stock trader, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a private school English teacher. As he considers leaving the city for good, or spending the next seven years in Hell, Monty must face everything he loves and hates about America in general and New York City in particular, culminating a visceral monologue that is among the best scenes in Lee’s career.

2. Malcolm X (1992)

Only Spike Lee could make a Hollywood biopic about Malcom X. That was especially true in 1992 when most of America still found his message too painful to consider. Yet Lee had not only the sway to get Warner Bros. to fund the picture (often by forcing the studio’s hand, following tactics he learned from his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola), but had the vision to ensure that the picture was faithful Malcolm X’s story. Moreover, only Lee had the filmmaking chops to turn the life of Malcom X into an epic and, it must be said, entertaining movie.

Of course, it helps that Lee had his greatest collaborator Denzel Washington in the lead, an actor capable of moving past the icon to find the human being. Co-written by Lee and Arnold Perl, themselves following The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the film traces Malcom Little’s days as a hustler living in Boston during World War II to his conversion to Islam after meeting Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) to becoming the Civil Rights leader we know today. Despite coming in at more than three and a half hours, Malcom X plays like old-school Hollywood spectacle without sacrificing any of the power of the man’s message.

1. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee has never stopped innovating and experimenting. Still, there’s no denying that one of his earliest movies remains his greatest: 1989’s Do the Right Thing. The story of tensions breaking in a Brooklyn neighborhood during an extremely hot day, Do the Right Thing demonstrates everything great about Lee as a filmmaker: his formal restlessness, his love of classic Hollywood, his fearless depiction of American racism, and his interest in communal life.

Lee takes the starring role as Mookie, a young man who supports the son he has with his girlfiend Tina (Rosie Perez) by delivering pizzas for Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello). As Mookie makes his deliveries and deals with the heat, always serenaded by the records played by the all-seeing DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), he encounters all manner of citizen, including the high-strung Buggin’ Out (Esposito), Sal’s racist son Pino (John Turturro), the mysterious Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and older on again/ff again couple Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Davis). Lee draws the characters with such love that the movie’s explosion of violence at the end still feels inevitable, heartbreaking, and necessary, all these years later.

The post The 10 Best Spike Lee Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Famous people spend so much of their lives being photographed that it is easy to forget how different they can look when they are not posing for the camera. The best celebrity photos often happen when nobody is ready for them, capturing a strange reaction, a hilarious expression, an awkward interaction, or a tiny moment that would have disappeared without a photographer nearby. These images can reveal personality in ways a carefully planned portrait never could. Sometimes the person is caught laughing, sometimes distracted, and occasionally doing something so unexpected that the photo becomes unforgettable. There is something especially entertaining about seeing famous faces simply caught off guard.

The post 15 Famous People Snapped in Unexpecting Moments appeared first on Den of Geek.

Spike Lee demanded immediate attention with his 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, and filmgoers have not been able to look away since. Not only has Lee established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers in cinema history—known for signatures such as his double dolly shot and declaring each work “A Spike Lee Joint”—but he’s continued to innovate, pushing the form forward even 40 years into his career.

With so many entries in his filmography, ranking Spike Lee will always be a daunting task. And to help, we are just looking at his narrative features, which excludes some incredible documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke) and great concert films (The Original Kings of Comedy, American Utopia). From those features, here are the 10 most formally exhilarating, thematically challenging, and ultimately unabashedly human works from this modern American virtuoso.

10. BlackKklansman (2018)

BlackKkKlansman finally gave Lee the Oscars attention he had long deserved, with six nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s not hard to see why this was the movie that mainstream institutions decided to award, and not just because it boasts a producing credit from Jordan Peele. BlackKklansman tells an irresistible true story about a Black police officer (John David Washington) who with the help of his Jewish partner (Adam Driver) goes undercover to infiltrate the KKK in 1970s Colorado Springs.

Most directors would take the opportunity to turn in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but not Lee. Instead he uses BlackKklansman as an opportunity to comment on the relationship between popular culture and American racism, from an opening that features Alec Baldwin playing a racist choking on his rhetoric while Gone With the Wind projects behind him to a formally thrilling sequence in which enpratued Black faces dissolve onto the screen to punctuate a speech by Black Panther Kwame Ture (an electric Corey Hawkins) about Black beauty. 

9. He Got Game (1998)

Akira Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune. Martin Scorsese has Robert De Niro, and Spike Lee found his perfect muse in Denzel Washington. Washington, of course, is one of the greatest actors of his generation and has done excellent work with a variety of filmmakers. But time and again, he’s proven himself perfectly suited to embodying sometimes contradictory emotions, playing ragged and cool at the same time, often while maintaining a sense of humor. And with the basketball drama He Got Game, Lee gives Washington one of his most complicated characters.

In He Got Game, Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth, whose son Jesus (played by Jade Yorker as a boy and by NBA star Ray Allen as an adult) is on the verge of a starting a phenomenal college basketball career, sure to lead to professional stardom. Hoping to sway Jesus’ decision toward the local state university, the governor has released Jake from prison where he’s been serving a sentence for killing Jesus’ mother. Despite the messy political and legal entanglements that set up the story, He Got Game tells a rich and complicated tale about family ties and the possibilities of forgiveness, all anchored by Washington bringing humanity to a troubling person.

8. Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Music has always been a major part of Lee’s movies, from the rich Terence Blanchard scores that fill most of his movies to pop music inserts, such as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” opening Do the Right Thing. So it’s no surprise that one of Lee’s best movies would put the focus on musicians, namely the members of the jazz combo the Bleek Quintet, led by trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Washington). The Quintet starts the fracture when saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes) begins demanding more attention, and problems with girlfriends cause tensions between the members. It’s all noise that threatens to disrupt the music.

Mo’ Better Blues revisits some of Lee’s favorite themes, including the spiritual nature of art and the inability of men and women to communicate with one another. Yet the pairing of Washington and Snipes infuses those themes with a new energy, as does the fact that the movie focuses on artists themselves. Rarely has Lee made himself so present in his work, not so much in his character, the Bleek Quintet’s manager Giant, but in the struggles of artists trying to make their way throughout society.

7. Inside Man (2006)

Here’s the shocking thing about Spike Lee: yes, he’s an incredible stylist with a clear, unmistakable voice, but he’s also a perfect blockbuster filmmaker. In another world, Lee could have just devoted himself to making big budget movies about cops and robbers doing exciting adventures. Instead he just occasionally reminds us what an effective crowd-pleaser he can be by occasionally doing straightforward genre pieces like Inside Man.

Inside Man begins with a delicious caper hook, in which detective Keith Frazier (Washington) and his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) try to defuse a hostage situation that arises when criminal Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his team rob a bank. From that starting point, Inside Man unfolds a twisty narrative about war criminals and dirty secrets, complete with appearances by stars such as Willem Dafoe, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer. In the end, Inside Man isn’t a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster; it’s a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster of the highest quality.

6. School Daze (1988)

Although it doesn’t happen until the very end of his second feature, Spike Lee properly arrives as an artist when Dap (Laurence Fishburne) looks directly at the camera and shouts to the audience, “Please, wake up!” The fact that the militant Dap gets the last word in School Daze underscores the importance of his worldview for the movie. But School Daze has room for a range of personalities and perspectives, making it one of Lee’s most vibrant entries, setting the stage for the often messy but always exhilarating work he’d do throughout his career.

School Daze takes place at the Atlanta HBCU Mission College, a fictional stand in for Lee’s own alma mater Morehouse College. While Dap tries to draw attention to South African apartheid, his classmates focus their attention on more collegiate concerns. For Half-Pint (Lee), that means pledging in the Gamma Phi Gamma; for the fraternity president Dean Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito), that means keeping a low profile; meanwhile others like Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) deal with issues of beauty standards and colorism. Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama, and sometimes a musical, School Daze gives plenty of attention to the varieties of human experience, making Dap’s closing plea all the more urgent.

5. Jungle Fever (1991)

On the surface, Jungle Fever plays like an average upper-middle-class drama, the sort of thing that Hollywood has been producing for centuries. Wesley Snipes portrays architect Flipper Purify, who lives a quiet life with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee) and their daughter, despite his frustrations with bosses who won’t advance his career. When Flipper begins an affair with his new secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra), he faces judgment from his friends and family, not the least of which includes his respected father, the Good Reverend Doctor Purify (Ossie Davis).

However, Lee uses that plot to explore assumptions about race, as Flipper and Angie’s respective friend and family groups object less to the fact of an affair than they do the fact that Flipper is Black and Angie is white. As the film’s title suggests, Jungle Fever doesn’t shy away from the cultural forces that influence our perceptions and desires. Instead it allows the viewers to sit in the various discomforts raised by Flipper and Angie’s relationship, making Jungle Fever a unique addition to Hollywood’s love affair with love affairs.

4. Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee is as much a student of cinema as he is a filmmaker, and he often works references to classic movies into his own projects. Unsurprisingly, Da 5 Bloods does feature nods to war flicks like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. However, it finds most inspiration in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as it follows a group of four Vietnam veterans—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—and Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) returning to Vietnam to find gold bars they buried during the war.

Old grudges and past hurt resurface as the men make their way to the treasure. And at the center of it all is their one missing member, their leader Stormin’ Norman Earl Holloway, who was killed in action and is played by Chadwick Boseman. Having already portrayed historical figures such as James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall, to say nothing of the superhero Black Panther, Boseman comes to the role well-suited to play a legendary soldier. That quality only intensified with Boseman’s shocking death, mere months after the release of Da 5 Bloods.

3. 25th Hour (2002)

In the 25 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, many movies have tried to capture that surreal moment of fear and fragile community. None have done it better than the first proper post-9/11 movie, 25th Hour. Although the film only occasionally references the attacks, having already been in pre-production on Sept. 11, it displays a self-destructive nation full of anger against itself, which refuses to accept its diversity, even as it realizes that diversity has always been a part of it.

Based on the novel by David Benioff, who wrote the screenplay and would later be half of Game of Thrones showrunning duo, 25th Hour stars Edward Norton as small-time drug dealer Monty Brogan. Busted for possession, Monty has one last day before he must report to prison, which he chooses to spend with his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), and his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper), an aggressive stock trader, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a private school English teacher. As he considers leaving the city for good, or spending the next seven years in Hell, Monty must face everything he loves and hates about America in general and New York City in particular, culminating a visceral monologue that is among the best scenes in Lee’s career.

2. Malcolm X (1992)

Only Spike Lee could make a Hollywood biopic about Malcom X. That was especially true in 1992 when most of America still found his message too painful to consider. Yet Lee had not only the sway to get Warner Bros. to fund the picture (often by forcing the studio’s hand, following tactics he learned from his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola), but had the vision to ensure that the picture was faithful Malcolm X’s story. Moreover, only Lee had the filmmaking chops to turn the life of Malcom X into an epic and, it must be said, entertaining movie.

Of course, it helps that Lee had his greatest collaborator Denzel Washington in the lead, an actor capable of moving past the icon to find the human being. Co-written by Lee and Arnold Perl, themselves following The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the film traces Malcom Little’s days as a hustler living in Boston during World War II to his conversion to Islam after meeting Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) to becoming the Civil Rights leader we know today. Despite coming in at more than three and a half hours, Malcom X plays like old-school Hollywood spectacle without sacrificing any of the power of the man’s message.

1. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee has never stopped innovating and experimenting. Still, there’s no denying that one of his earliest movies remains his greatest: 1989’s Do the Right Thing. The story of tensions breaking in a Brooklyn neighborhood during an extremely hot day, Do the Right Thing demonstrates everything great about Lee as a filmmaker: his formal restlessness, his love of classic Hollywood, his fearless depiction of American racism, and his interest in communal life.

Lee takes the starring role as Mookie, a young man who supports the son he has with his girlfiend Tina (Rosie Perez) by delivering pizzas for Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello). As Mookie makes his deliveries and deals with the heat, always serenaded by the records played by the all-seeing DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), he encounters all manner of citizen, including the high-strung Buggin’ Out (Esposito), Sal’s racist son Pino (John Turturro), the mysterious Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and older on again/ff again couple Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Davis). Lee draws the characters with such love that the movie’s explosion of violence at the end still feels inevitable, heartbreaking, and necessary, all these years later.

The post The 10 Best Spike Lee Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article originally appeared as part of the Den of Geek “Absolute Cinema” newsletter. Find out how to subscribe here. Twenty-five years is obviously a long time. In a quarter-century, social media services flourished, smartphones multiplied, and entire generations were born and came of age. That distance is probably why today’s sobering 25th anniversary of […]

The post The Movie That Best Captured That Post-9/11 Feeling appeared first on Den of Geek.

Spike Lee demanded immediate attention with his 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, and filmgoers have not been able to look away since. Not only has Lee established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers in cinema history—known for signatures such as his double dolly shot and declaring each work “A Spike Lee Joint”—but he’s continued to innovate, pushing the form forward even 40 years into his career.

With so many entries in his filmography, ranking Spike Lee will always be a daunting task. And to help, we are just looking at his narrative features, which excludes some incredible documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke) and great concert films (The Original Kings of Comedy, American Utopia). From those features, here are the 10 most formally exhilarating, thematically challenging, and ultimately unabashedly human works from this modern American virtuoso.

10. BlackKklansman (2018)

BlackKkKlansman finally gave Lee the Oscars attention he had long deserved, with six nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s not hard to see why this was the movie that mainstream institutions decided to award, and not just because it boasts a producing credit from Jordan Peele. BlackKklansman tells an irresistible true story about a Black police officer (John David Washington) who with the help of his Jewish partner (Adam Driver) goes undercover to infiltrate the KKK in 1970s Colorado Springs.

Most directors would take the opportunity to turn in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but not Lee. Instead he uses BlackKklansman as an opportunity to comment on the relationship between popular culture and American racism, from an opening that features Alec Baldwin playing a racist choking on his rhetoric while Gone With the Wind projects behind him to a formally thrilling sequence in which enpratued Black faces dissolve onto the screen to punctuate a speech by Black Panther Kwame Ture (an electric Corey Hawkins) about Black beauty. 

9. He Got Game (1998)

Akira Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune. Martin Scorsese has Robert De Niro, and Spike Lee found his perfect muse in Denzel Washington. Washington, of course, is one of the greatest actors of his generation and has done excellent work with a variety of filmmakers. But time and again, he’s proven himself perfectly suited to embodying sometimes contradictory emotions, playing ragged and cool at the same time, often while maintaining a sense of humor. And with the basketball drama He Got Game, Lee gives Washington one of his most complicated characters.

In He Got Game, Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth, whose son Jesus (played by Jade Yorker as a boy and by NBA star Ray Allen as an adult) is on the verge of a starting a phenomenal college basketball career, sure to lead to professional stardom. Hoping to sway Jesus’ decision toward the local state university, the governor has released Jake from prison where he’s been serving a sentence for killing Jesus’ mother. Despite the messy political and legal entanglements that set up the story, He Got Game tells a rich and complicated tale about family ties and the possibilities of forgiveness, all anchored by Washington bringing humanity to a troubling person.

8. Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Music has always been a major part of Lee’s movies, from the rich Terence Blanchard scores that fill most of his movies to pop music inserts, such as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” opening Do the Right Thing. So it’s no surprise that one of Lee’s best movies would put the focus on musicians, namely the members of the jazz combo the Bleek Quintet, led by trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Washington). The Quintet starts the fracture when saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes) begins demanding more attention, and problems with girlfriends cause tensions between the members. It’s all noise that threatens to disrupt the music.

Mo’ Better Blues revisits some of Lee’s favorite themes, including the spiritual nature of art and the inability of men and women to communicate with one another. Yet the pairing of Washington and Snipes infuses those themes with a new energy, as does the fact that the movie focuses on artists themselves. Rarely has Lee made himself so present in his work, not so much in his character, the Bleek Quintet’s manager Giant, but in the struggles of artists trying to make their way throughout society.

7. Inside Man (2006)

Here’s the shocking thing about Spike Lee: yes, he’s an incredible stylist with a clear, unmistakable voice, but he’s also a perfect blockbuster filmmaker. In another world, Lee could have just devoted himself to making big budget movies about cops and robbers doing exciting adventures. Instead he just occasionally reminds us what an effective crowd-pleaser he can be by occasionally doing straightforward genre pieces like Inside Man.

Inside Man begins with a delicious caper hook, in which detective Keith Frazier (Washington) and his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) try to defuse a hostage situation that arises when criminal Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his team rob a bank. From that starting point, Inside Man unfolds a twisty narrative about war criminals and dirty secrets, complete with appearances by stars such as Willem Dafoe, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer. In the end, Inside Man isn’t a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster; it’s a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster of the highest quality.

6. School Daze (1988)

Although it doesn’t happen until the very end of his second feature, Spike Lee properly arrives as an artist when Dap (Laurence Fishburne) looks directly at the camera and shouts to the audience, “Please, wake up!” The fact that the militant Dap gets the last word in School Daze underscores the importance of his worldview for the movie. But School Daze has room for a range of personalities and perspectives, making it one of Lee’s most vibrant entries, setting the stage for the often messy but always exhilarating work he’d do throughout his career.

School Daze takes place at the Atlanta HBCU Mission College, a fictional stand in for Lee’s own alma mater Morehouse College. While Dap tries to draw attention to South African apartheid, his classmates focus their attention on more collegiate concerns. For Half-Pint (Lee), that means pledging in the Gamma Phi Gamma; for the fraternity president Dean Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito), that means keeping a low profile; meanwhile others like Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) deal with issues of beauty standards and colorism. Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama, and sometimes a musical, School Daze gives plenty of attention to the varieties of human experience, making Dap’s closing plea all the more urgent.

5. Jungle Fever (1991)

On the surface, Jungle Fever plays like an average upper-middle-class drama, the sort of thing that Hollywood has been producing for centuries. Wesley Snipes portrays architect Flipper Purify, who lives a quiet life with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee) and their daughter, despite his frustrations with bosses who won’t advance his career. When Flipper begins an affair with his new secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra), he faces judgment from his friends and family, not the least of which includes his respected father, the Good Reverend Doctor Purify (Ossie Davis).

However, Lee uses that plot to explore assumptions about race, as Flipper and Angie’s respective friend and family groups object less to the fact of an affair than they do the fact that Flipper is Black and Angie is white. As the film’s title suggests, Jungle Fever doesn’t shy away from the cultural forces that influence our perceptions and desires. Instead it allows the viewers to sit in the various discomforts raised by Flipper and Angie’s relationship, making Jungle Fever a unique addition to Hollywood’s love affair with love affairs.

4. Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee is as much a student of cinema as he is a filmmaker, and he often works references to classic movies into his own projects. Unsurprisingly, Da 5 Bloods does feature nods to war flicks like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. However, it finds most inspiration in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as it follows a group of four Vietnam veterans—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—and Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) returning to Vietnam to find gold bars they buried during the war.

Old grudges and past hurt resurface as the men make their way to the treasure. And at the center of it all is their one missing member, their leader Stormin’ Norman Earl Holloway, who was killed in action and is played by Chadwick Boseman. Having already portrayed historical figures such as James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall, to say nothing of the superhero Black Panther, Boseman comes to the role well-suited to play a legendary soldier. That quality only intensified with Boseman’s shocking death, mere months after the release of Da 5 Bloods.

3. 25th Hour (2002)

In the 25 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, many movies have tried to capture that surreal moment of fear and fragile community. None have done it better than the first proper post-9/11 movie, 25th Hour. Although the film only occasionally references the attacks, having already been in pre-production on Sept. 11, it displays a self-destructive nation full of anger against itself, which refuses to accept its diversity, even as it realizes that diversity has always been a part of it.

Based on the novel by David Benioff, who wrote the screenplay and would later be half of Game of Thrones showrunning duo, 25th Hour stars Edward Norton as small-time drug dealer Monty Brogan. Busted for possession, Monty has one last day before he must report to prison, which he chooses to spend with his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), and his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper), an aggressive stock trader, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a private school English teacher. As he considers leaving the city for good, or spending the next seven years in Hell, Monty must face everything he loves and hates about America in general and New York City in particular, culminating a visceral monologue that is among the best scenes in Lee’s career.

2. Malcolm X (1992)

Only Spike Lee could make a Hollywood biopic about Malcom X. That was especially true in 1992 when most of America still found his message too painful to consider. Yet Lee had not only the sway to get Warner Bros. to fund the picture (often by forcing the studio’s hand, following tactics he learned from his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola), but had the vision to ensure that the picture was faithful Malcolm X’s story. Moreover, only Lee had the filmmaking chops to turn the life of Malcom X into an epic and, it must be said, entertaining movie.

Of course, it helps that Lee had his greatest collaborator Denzel Washington in the lead, an actor capable of moving past the icon to find the human being. Co-written by Lee and Arnold Perl, themselves following The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the film traces Malcom Little’s days as a hustler living in Boston during World War II to his conversion to Islam after meeting Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) to becoming the Civil Rights leader we know today. Despite coming in at more than three and a half hours, Malcom X plays like old-school Hollywood spectacle without sacrificing any of the power of the man’s message.

1. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee has never stopped innovating and experimenting. Still, there’s no denying that one of his earliest movies remains his greatest: 1989’s Do the Right Thing. The story of tensions breaking in a Brooklyn neighborhood during an extremely hot day, Do the Right Thing demonstrates everything great about Lee as a filmmaker: his formal restlessness, his love of classic Hollywood, his fearless depiction of American racism, and his interest in communal life.

Lee takes the starring role as Mookie, a young man who supports the son he has with his girlfiend Tina (Rosie Perez) by delivering pizzas for Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello). As Mookie makes his deliveries and deals with the heat, always serenaded by the records played by the all-seeing DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), he encounters all manner of citizen, including the high-strung Buggin’ Out (Esposito), Sal’s racist son Pino (John Turturro), the mysterious Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and older on again/ff again couple Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Davis). Lee draws the characters with such love that the movie’s explosion of violence at the end still feels inevitable, heartbreaking, and necessary, all these years later.

The post The 10 Best Spike Lee Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Watching an older movie can feel like opening a time capsule. Some details are obvious, like enormous phones, cigarette smoke everywhere, or people somehow making plans without texting each other. Others are much easier to miss because they were completely normal when the movie was made. A character can casually walk into a building without security checks, leave a message on an answering machine, or spend hours looking for someone without reaching for a phone. These little moments can be more fascinating than the main plot because they reveal how much ordinary life has changed. Once you start noticing them, old movies become surprisingly entertaining records of another everyday world.

The post 15 Things You Can Spot in Old Movies That Would Never Happen Today appeared first on Den of Geek.

Spike Lee demanded immediate attention with his 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, and filmgoers have not been able to look away since. Not only has Lee established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers in cinema history—known for signatures such as his double dolly shot and declaring each work “A Spike Lee Joint”—but he’s continued to innovate, pushing the form forward even 40 years into his career.

With so many entries in his filmography, ranking Spike Lee will always be a daunting task. And to help, we are just looking at his narrative features, which excludes some incredible documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke) and great concert films (The Original Kings of Comedy, American Utopia). From those features, here are the 10 most formally exhilarating, thematically challenging, and ultimately unabashedly human works from this modern American virtuoso.

10. BlackKklansman (2018)

BlackKkKlansman finally gave Lee the Oscars attention he had long deserved, with six nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s not hard to see why this was the movie that mainstream institutions decided to award, and not just because it boasts a producing credit from Jordan Peele. BlackKklansman tells an irresistible true story about a Black police officer (John David Washington) who with the help of his Jewish partner (Adam Driver) goes undercover to infiltrate the KKK in 1970s Colorado Springs.

Most directors would take the opportunity to turn in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but not Lee. Instead he uses BlackKklansman as an opportunity to comment on the relationship between popular culture and American racism, from an opening that features Alec Baldwin playing a racist choking on his rhetoric while Gone With the Wind projects behind him to a formally thrilling sequence in which enpratued Black faces dissolve onto the screen to punctuate a speech by Black Panther Kwame Ture (an electric Corey Hawkins) about Black beauty. 

9. He Got Game (1998)

Akira Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune. Martin Scorsese has Robert De Niro, and Spike Lee found his perfect muse in Denzel Washington. Washington, of course, is one of the greatest actors of his generation and has done excellent work with a variety of filmmakers. But time and again, he’s proven himself perfectly suited to embodying sometimes contradictory emotions, playing ragged and cool at the same time, often while maintaining a sense of humor. And with the basketball drama He Got Game, Lee gives Washington one of his most complicated characters.

In He Got Game, Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth, whose son Jesus (played by Jade Yorker as a boy and by NBA star Ray Allen as an adult) is on the verge of a starting a phenomenal college basketball career, sure to lead to professional stardom. Hoping to sway Jesus’ decision toward the local state university, the governor has released Jake from prison where he’s been serving a sentence for killing Jesus’ mother. Despite the messy political and legal entanglements that set up the story, He Got Game tells a rich and complicated tale about family ties and the possibilities of forgiveness, all anchored by Washington bringing humanity to a troubling person.

8. Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Music has always been a major part of Lee’s movies, from the rich Terence Blanchard scores that fill most of his movies to pop music inserts, such as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” opening Do the Right Thing. So it’s no surprise that one of Lee’s best movies would put the focus on musicians, namely the members of the jazz combo the Bleek Quintet, led by trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Washington). The Quintet starts the fracture when saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes) begins demanding more attention, and problems with girlfriends cause tensions between the members. It’s all noise that threatens to disrupt the music.

Mo’ Better Blues revisits some of Lee’s favorite themes, including the spiritual nature of art and the inability of men and women to communicate with one another. Yet the pairing of Washington and Snipes infuses those themes with a new energy, as does the fact that the movie focuses on artists themselves. Rarely has Lee made himself so present in his work, not so much in his character, the Bleek Quintet’s manager Giant, but in the struggles of artists trying to make their way throughout society.

7. Inside Man (2006)

Here’s the shocking thing about Spike Lee: yes, he’s an incredible stylist with a clear, unmistakable voice, but he’s also a perfect blockbuster filmmaker. In another world, Lee could have just devoted himself to making big budget movies about cops and robbers doing exciting adventures. Instead he just occasionally reminds us what an effective crowd-pleaser he can be by occasionally doing straightforward genre pieces like Inside Man.

Inside Man begins with a delicious caper hook, in which detective Keith Frazier (Washington) and his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) try to defuse a hostage situation that arises when criminal Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his team rob a bank. From that starting point, Inside Man unfolds a twisty narrative about war criminals and dirty secrets, complete with appearances by stars such as Willem Dafoe, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer. In the end, Inside Man isn’t a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster; it’s a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster of the highest quality.

6. School Daze (1988)

Although it doesn’t happen until the very end of his second feature, Spike Lee properly arrives as an artist when Dap (Laurence Fishburne) looks directly at the camera and shouts to the audience, “Please, wake up!” The fact that the militant Dap gets the last word in School Daze underscores the importance of his worldview for the movie. But School Daze has room for a range of personalities and perspectives, making it one of Lee’s most vibrant entries, setting the stage for the often messy but always exhilarating work he’d do throughout his career.

School Daze takes place at the Atlanta HBCU Mission College, a fictional stand in for Lee’s own alma mater Morehouse College. While Dap tries to draw attention to South African apartheid, his classmates focus their attention on more collegiate concerns. For Half-Pint (Lee), that means pledging in the Gamma Phi Gamma; for the fraternity president Dean Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito), that means keeping a low profile; meanwhile others like Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) deal with issues of beauty standards and colorism. Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama, and sometimes a musical, School Daze gives plenty of attention to the varieties of human experience, making Dap’s closing plea all the more urgent.

5. Jungle Fever (1991)

On the surface, Jungle Fever plays like an average upper-middle-class drama, the sort of thing that Hollywood has been producing for centuries. Wesley Snipes portrays architect Flipper Purify, who lives a quiet life with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee) and their daughter, despite his frustrations with bosses who won’t advance his career. When Flipper begins an affair with his new secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra), he faces judgment from his friends and family, not the least of which includes his respected father, the Good Reverend Doctor Purify (Ossie Davis).

However, Lee uses that plot to explore assumptions about race, as Flipper and Angie’s respective friend and family groups object less to the fact of an affair than they do the fact that Flipper is Black and Angie is white. As the film’s title suggests, Jungle Fever doesn’t shy away from the cultural forces that influence our perceptions and desires. Instead it allows the viewers to sit in the various discomforts raised by Flipper and Angie’s relationship, making Jungle Fever a unique addition to Hollywood’s love affair with love affairs.

4. Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee is as much a student of cinema as he is a filmmaker, and he often works references to classic movies into his own projects. Unsurprisingly, Da 5 Bloods does feature nods to war flicks like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. However, it finds most inspiration in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as it follows a group of four Vietnam veterans—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—and Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) returning to Vietnam to find gold bars they buried during the war.

Old grudges and past hurt resurface as the men make their way to the treasure. And at the center of it all is their one missing member, their leader Stormin’ Norman Earl Holloway, who was killed in action and is played by Chadwick Boseman. Having already portrayed historical figures such as James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall, to say nothing of the superhero Black Panther, Boseman comes to the role well-suited to play a legendary soldier. That quality only intensified with Boseman’s shocking death, mere months after the release of Da 5 Bloods.

3. 25th Hour (2002)

In the 25 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, many movies have tried to capture that surreal moment of fear and fragile community. None have done it better than the first proper post-9/11 movie, 25th Hour. Although the film only occasionally references the attacks, having already been in pre-production on Sept. 11, it displays a self-destructive nation full of anger against itself, which refuses to accept its diversity, even as it realizes that diversity has always been a part of it.

Based on the novel by David Benioff, who wrote the screenplay and would later be half of Game of Thrones showrunning duo, 25th Hour stars Edward Norton as small-time drug dealer Monty Brogan. Busted for possession, Monty has one last day before he must report to prison, which he chooses to spend with his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), and his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper), an aggressive stock trader, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a private school English teacher. As he considers leaving the city for good, or spending the next seven years in Hell, Monty must face everything he loves and hates about America in general and New York City in particular, culminating a visceral monologue that is among the best scenes in Lee’s career.

2. Malcolm X (1992)

Only Spike Lee could make a Hollywood biopic about Malcom X. That was especially true in 1992 when most of America still found his message too painful to consider. Yet Lee had not only the sway to get Warner Bros. to fund the picture (often by forcing the studio’s hand, following tactics he learned from his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola), but had the vision to ensure that the picture was faithful Malcolm X’s story. Moreover, only Lee had the filmmaking chops to turn the life of Malcom X into an epic and, it must be said, entertaining movie.

Of course, it helps that Lee had his greatest collaborator Denzel Washington in the lead, an actor capable of moving past the icon to find the human being. Co-written by Lee and Arnold Perl, themselves following The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the film traces Malcom Little’s days as a hustler living in Boston during World War II to his conversion to Islam after meeting Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) to becoming the Civil Rights leader we know today. Despite coming in at more than three and a half hours, Malcom X plays like old-school Hollywood spectacle without sacrificing any of the power of the man’s message.

1. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee has never stopped innovating and experimenting. Still, there’s no denying that one of his earliest movies remains his greatest: 1989’s Do the Right Thing. The story of tensions breaking in a Brooklyn neighborhood during an extremely hot day, Do the Right Thing demonstrates everything great about Lee as a filmmaker: his formal restlessness, his love of classic Hollywood, his fearless depiction of American racism, and his interest in communal life.

Lee takes the starring role as Mookie, a young man who supports the son he has with his girlfiend Tina (Rosie Perez) by delivering pizzas for Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello). As Mookie makes his deliveries and deals with the heat, always serenaded by the records played by the all-seeing DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), he encounters all manner of citizen, including the high-strung Buggin’ Out (Esposito), Sal’s racist son Pino (John Turturro), the mysterious Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and older on again/ff again couple Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Davis). Lee draws the characters with such love that the movie’s explosion of violence at the end still feels inevitable, heartbreaking, and necessary, all these years later.

The post The 10 Best Spike Lee Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Humor, sensible themes and what we can talk about on screen changes drastically with the times, reflecting how we ourselves change and evolve as a society. Technology isn’t the only thing moving forward, after all, and part of adapting to the changing times is understanding that, while some movies of the past were enjoyable back then, they aren’t so much so right now.

You can still appreciate these movies, of course, with performances, filmmaking, and widely cultural impact; what matters is recognizing that parts have aged badly. These are classic movies that often make modern viewers feel that admitting how much they enjoy them requires an immediate disclaimer.

The post 15 Classic Movies it Feels Like You’re Not Allowed to Love Anymore appeared first on Den of Geek.

Spike Lee demanded immediate attention with his 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, and filmgoers have not been able to look away since. Not only has Lee established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers in cinema history—known for signatures such as his double dolly shot and declaring each work “A Spike Lee Joint”—but he’s continued to innovate, pushing the form forward even 40 years into his career.

With so many entries in his filmography, ranking Spike Lee will always be a daunting task. And to help, we are just looking at his narrative features, which excludes some incredible documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke) and great concert films (The Original Kings of Comedy, American Utopia). From those features, here are the 10 most formally exhilarating, thematically challenging, and ultimately unabashedly human works from this modern American virtuoso.

10. BlackKklansman (2018)

BlackKkKlansman finally gave Lee the Oscars attention he had long deserved, with six nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s not hard to see why this was the movie that mainstream institutions decided to award, and not just because it boasts a producing credit from Jordan Peele. BlackKklansman tells an irresistible true story about a Black police officer (John David Washington) who with the help of his Jewish partner (Adam Driver) goes undercover to infiltrate the KKK in 1970s Colorado Springs.

Most directors would take the opportunity to turn in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but not Lee. Instead he uses BlackKklansman as an opportunity to comment on the relationship between popular culture and American racism, from an opening that features Alec Baldwin playing a racist choking on his rhetoric while Gone With the Wind projects behind him to a formally thrilling sequence in which enpratued Black faces dissolve onto the screen to punctuate a speech by Black Panther Kwame Ture (an electric Corey Hawkins) about Black beauty. 

9. He Got Game (1998)

Akira Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune. Martin Scorsese has Robert De Niro, and Spike Lee found his perfect muse in Denzel Washington. Washington, of course, is one of the greatest actors of his generation and has done excellent work with a variety of filmmakers. But time and again, he’s proven himself perfectly suited to embodying sometimes contradictory emotions, playing ragged and cool at the same time, often while maintaining a sense of humor. And with the basketball drama He Got Game, Lee gives Washington one of his most complicated characters.

In He Got Game, Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth, whose son Jesus (played by Jade Yorker as a boy and by NBA star Ray Allen as an adult) is on the verge of a starting a phenomenal college basketball career, sure to lead to professional stardom. Hoping to sway Jesus’ decision toward the local state university, the governor has released Jake from prison where he’s been serving a sentence for killing Jesus’ mother. Despite the messy political and legal entanglements that set up the story, He Got Game tells a rich and complicated tale about family ties and the possibilities of forgiveness, all anchored by Washington bringing humanity to a troubling person.

8. Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Music has always been a major part of Lee’s movies, from the rich Terence Blanchard scores that fill most of his movies to pop music inserts, such as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” opening Do the Right Thing. So it’s no surprise that one of Lee’s best movies would put the focus on musicians, namely the members of the jazz combo the Bleek Quintet, led by trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Washington). The Quintet starts the fracture when saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes) begins demanding more attention, and problems with girlfriends cause tensions between the members. It’s all noise that threatens to disrupt the music.

Mo’ Better Blues revisits some of Lee’s favorite themes, including the spiritual nature of art and the inability of men and women to communicate with one another. Yet the pairing of Washington and Snipes infuses those themes with a new energy, as does the fact that the movie focuses on artists themselves. Rarely has Lee made himself so present in his work, not so much in his character, the Bleek Quintet’s manager Giant, but in the struggles of artists trying to make their way throughout society.

7. Inside Man (2006)

Here’s the shocking thing about Spike Lee: yes, he’s an incredible stylist with a clear, unmistakable voice, but he’s also a perfect blockbuster filmmaker. In another world, Lee could have just devoted himself to making big budget movies about cops and robbers doing exciting adventures. Instead he just occasionally reminds us what an effective crowd-pleaser he can be by occasionally doing straightforward genre pieces like Inside Man.

Inside Man begins with a delicious caper hook, in which detective Keith Frazier (Washington) and his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) try to defuse a hostage situation that arises when criminal Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his team rob a bank. From that starting point, Inside Man unfolds a twisty narrative about war criminals and dirty secrets, complete with appearances by stars such as Willem Dafoe, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer. In the end, Inside Man isn’t a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster; it’s a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster of the highest quality.

6. School Daze (1988)

Although it doesn’t happen until the very end of his second feature, Spike Lee properly arrives as an artist when Dap (Laurence Fishburne) looks directly at the camera and shouts to the audience, “Please, wake up!” The fact that the militant Dap gets the last word in School Daze underscores the importance of his worldview for the movie. But School Daze has room for a range of personalities and perspectives, making it one of Lee’s most vibrant entries, setting the stage for the often messy but always exhilarating work he’d do throughout his career.

School Daze takes place at the Atlanta HBCU Mission College, a fictional stand in for Lee’s own alma mater Morehouse College. While Dap tries to draw attention to South African apartheid, his classmates focus their attention on more collegiate concerns. For Half-Pint (Lee), that means pledging in the Gamma Phi Gamma; for the fraternity president Dean Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito), that means keeping a low profile; meanwhile others like Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) deal with issues of beauty standards and colorism. Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama, and sometimes a musical, School Daze gives plenty of attention to the varieties of human experience, making Dap’s closing plea all the more urgent.

5. Jungle Fever (1991)

On the surface, Jungle Fever plays like an average upper-middle-class drama, the sort of thing that Hollywood has been producing for centuries. Wesley Snipes portrays architect Flipper Purify, who lives a quiet life with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee) and their daughter, despite his frustrations with bosses who won’t advance his career. When Flipper begins an affair with his new secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra), he faces judgment from his friends and family, not the least of which includes his respected father, the Good Reverend Doctor Purify (Ossie Davis).

However, Lee uses that plot to explore assumptions about race, as Flipper and Angie’s respective friend and family groups object less to the fact of an affair than they do the fact that Flipper is Black and Angie is white. As the film’s title suggests, Jungle Fever doesn’t shy away from the cultural forces that influence our perceptions and desires. Instead it allows the viewers to sit in the various discomforts raised by Flipper and Angie’s relationship, making Jungle Fever a unique addition to Hollywood’s love affair with love affairs.

4. Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee is as much a student of cinema as he is a filmmaker, and he often works references to classic movies into his own projects. Unsurprisingly, Da 5 Bloods does feature nods to war flicks like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. However, it finds most inspiration in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as it follows a group of four Vietnam veterans—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—and Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) returning to Vietnam to find gold bars they buried during the war.

Old grudges and past hurt resurface as the men make their way to the treasure. And at the center of it all is their one missing member, their leader Stormin’ Norman Earl Holloway, who was killed in action and is played by Chadwick Boseman. Having already portrayed historical figures such as James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall, to say nothing of the superhero Black Panther, Boseman comes to the role well-suited to play a legendary soldier. That quality only intensified with Boseman’s shocking death, mere months after the release of Da 5 Bloods.

3. 25th Hour (2002)

In the 25 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, many movies have tried to capture that surreal moment of fear and fragile community. None have done it better than the first proper post-9/11 movie, 25th Hour. Although the film only occasionally references the attacks, having already been in pre-production on Sept. 11, it displays a self-destructive nation full of anger against itself, which refuses to accept its diversity, even as it realizes that diversity has always been a part of it.

Based on the novel by David Benioff, who wrote the screenplay and would later be half of Game of Thrones showrunning duo, 25th Hour stars Edward Norton as small-time drug dealer Monty Brogan. Busted for possession, Monty has one last day before he must report to prison, which he chooses to spend with his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), and his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper), an aggressive stock trader, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a private school English teacher. As he considers leaving the city for good, or spending the next seven years in Hell, Monty must face everything he loves and hates about America in general and New York City in particular, culminating a visceral monologue that is among the best scenes in Lee’s career.

2. Malcolm X (1992)

Only Spike Lee could make a Hollywood biopic about Malcom X. That was especially true in 1992 when most of America still found his message too painful to consider. Yet Lee had not only the sway to get Warner Bros. to fund the picture (often by forcing the studio’s hand, following tactics he learned from his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola), but had the vision to ensure that the picture was faithful Malcolm X’s story. Moreover, only Lee had the filmmaking chops to turn the life of Malcom X into an epic and, it must be said, entertaining movie.

Of course, it helps that Lee had his greatest collaborator Denzel Washington in the lead, an actor capable of moving past the icon to find the human being. Co-written by Lee and Arnold Perl, themselves following The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the film traces Malcom Little’s days as a hustler living in Boston during World War II to his conversion to Islam after meeting Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) to becoming the Civil Rights leader we know today. Despite coming in at more than three and a half hours, Malcom X plays like old-school Hollywood spectacle without sacrificing any of the power of the man’s message.

1. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee has never stopped innovating and experimenting. Still, there’s no denying that one of his earliest movies remains his greatest: 1989’s Do the Right Thing. The story of tensions breaking in a Brooklyn neighborhood during an extremely hot day, Do the Right Thing demonstrates everything great about Lee as a filmmaker: his formal restlessness, his love of classic Hollywood, his fearless depiction of American racism, and his interest in communal life.

Lee takes the starring role as Mookie, a young man who supports the son he has with his girlfiend Tina (Rosie Perez) by delivering pizzas for Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello). As Mookie makes his deliveries and deals with the heat, always serenaded by the records played by the all-seeing DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), he encounters all manner of citizen, including the high-strung Buggin’ Out (Esposito), Sal’s racist son Pino (John Turturro), the mysterious Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and older on again/ff again couple Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Davis). Lee draws the characters with such love that the movie’s explosion of violence at the end still feels inevitable, heartbreaking, and necessary, all these years later.

The post The 10 Best Spike Lee Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

There is something remarkable about realizing that some of the faces who defined classic Hollywood are still here. These actors and actresses became stars when movie theaters, studio publicity, and television appearances shaped celebrity culture, and their careers helped create the images of glamour and stardom that people still recognize today. Some are still working, others rarely appear publicly, but all of them have lived long enough to witness several generations of Hollywood transform around them. A few even began acting more than seven decades ago. Here are 12 vintage leading men and ladies who remain with us in 2026, carrying an extraordinary connection to a very different era of movies.

The post 12 Vintage Leading Men and Ladies Who Are Still Alive appeared first on Den of Geek.

Spike Lee demanded immediate attention with his 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, and filmgoers have not been able to look away since. Not only has Lee established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers in cinema history—known for signatures such as his double dolly shot and declaring each work “A Spike Lee Joint”—but he’s continued to innovate, pushing the form forward even 40 years into his career.

With so many entries in his filmography, ranking Spike Lee will always be a daunting task. And to help, we are just looking at his narrative features, which excludes some incredible documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke) and great concert films (The Original Kings of Comedy, American Utopia). From those features, here are the 10 most formally exhilarating, thematically challenging, and ultimately unabashedly human works from this modern American virtuoso.

10. BlackKklansman (2018)

BlackKkKlansman finally gave Lee the Oscars attention he had long deserved, with six nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s not hard to see why this was the movie that mainstream institutions decided to award, and not just because it boasts a producing credit from Jordan Peele. BlackKklansman tells an irresistible true story about a Black police officer (John David Washington) who with the help of his Jewish partner (Adam Driver) goes undercover to infiltrate the KKK in 1970s Colorado Springs.

Most directors would take the opportunity to turn in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but not Lee. Instead he uses BlackKklansman as an opportunity to comment on the relationship between popular culture and American racism, from an opening that features Alec Baldwin playing a racist choking on his rhetoric while Gone With the Wind projects behind him to a formally thrilling sequence in which enpratued Black faces dissolve onto the screen to punctuate a speech by Black Panther Kwame Ture (an electric Corey Hawkins) about Black beauty. 

9. He Got Game (1998)

Akira Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune. Martin Scorsese has Robert De Niro, and Spike Lee found his perfect muse in Denzel Washington. Washington, of course, is one of the greatest actors of his generation and has done excellent work with a variety of filmmakers. But time and again, he’s proven himself perfectly suited to embodying sometimes contradictory emotions, playing ragged and cool at the same time, often while maintaining a sense of humor. And with the basketball drama He Got Game, Lee gives Washington one of his most complicated characters.

In He Got Game, Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth, whose son Jesus (played by Jade Yorker as a boy and by NBA star Ray Allen as an adult) is on the verge of a starting a phenomenal college basketball career, sure to lead to professional stardom. Hoping to sway Jesus’ decision toward the local state university, the governor has released Jake from prison where he’s been serving a sentence for killing Jesus’ mother. Despite the messy political and legal entanglements that set up the story, He Got Game tells a rich and complicated tale about family ties and the possibilities of forgiveness, all anchored by Washington bringing humanity to a troubling person.

8. Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Music has always been a major part of Lee’s movies, from the rich Terence Blanchard scores that fill most of his movies to pop music inserts, such as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” opening Do the Right Thing. So it’s no surprise that one of Lee’s best movies would put the focus on musicians, namely the members of the jazz combo the Bleek Quintet, led by trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Washington). The Quintet starts the fracture when saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes) begins demanding more attention, and problems with girlfriends cause tensions between the members. It’s all noise that threatens to disrupt the music.

Mo’ Better Blues revisits some of Lee’s favorite themes, including the spiritual nature of art and the inability of men and women to communicate with one another. Yet the pairing of Washington and Snipes infuses those themes with a new energy, as does the fact that the movie focuses on artists themselves. Rarely has Lee made himself so present in his work, not so much in his character, the Bleek Quintet’s manager Giant, but in the struggles of artists trying to make their way throughout society.

7. Inside Man (2006)

Here’s the shocking thing about Spike Lee: yes, he’s an incredible stylist with a clear, unmistakable voice, but he’s also a perfect blockbuster filmmaker. In another world, Lee could have just devoted himself to making big budget movies about cops and robbers doing exciting adventures. Instead he just occasionally reminds us what an effective crowd-pleaser he can be by occasionally doing straightforward genre pieces like Inside Man.

Inside Man begins with a delicious caper hook, in which detective Keith Frazier (Washington) and his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) try to defuse a hostage situation that arises when criminal Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his team rob a bank. From that starting point, Inside Man unfolds a twisty narrative about war criminals and dirty secrets, complete with appearances by stars such as Willem Dafoe, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer. In the end, Inside Man isn’t a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster; it’s a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster of the highest quality.

6. School Daze (1988)

Although it doesn’t happen until the very end of his second feature, Spike Lee properly arrives as an artist when Dap (Laurence Fishburne) looks directly at the camera and shouts to the audience, “Please, wake up!” The fact that the militant Dap gets the last word in School Daze underscores the importance of his worldview for the movie. But School Daze has room for a range of personalities and perspectives, making it one of Lee’s most vibrant entries, setting the stage for the often messy but always exhilarating work he’d do throughout his career.

School Daze takes place at the Atlanta HBCU Mission College, a fictional stand in for Lee’s own alma mater Morehouse College. While Dap tries to draw attention to South African apartheid, his classmates focus their attention on more collegiate concerns. For Half-Pint (Lee), that means pledging in the Gamma Phi Gamma; for the fraternity president Dean Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito), that means keeping a low profile; meanwhile others like Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) deal with issues of beauty standards and colorism. Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama, and sometimes a musical, School Daze gives plenty of attention to the varieties of human experience, making Dap’s closing plea all the more urgent.

5. Jungle Fever (1991)

On the surface, Jungle Fever plays like an average upper-middle-class drama, the sort of thing that Hollywood has been producing for centuries. Wesley Snipes portrays architect Flipper Purify, who lives a quiet life with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee) and their daughter, despite his frustrations with bosses who won’t advance his career. When Flipper begins an affair with his new secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra), he faces judgment from his friends and family, not the least of which includes his respected father, the Good Reverend Doctor Purify (Ossie Davis).

However, Lee uses that plot to explore assumptions about race, as Flipper and Angie’s respective friend and family groups object less to the fact of an affair than they do the fact that Flipper is Black and Angie is white. As the film’s title suggests, Jungle Fever doesn’t shy away from the cultural forces that influence our perceptions and desires. Instead it allows the viewers to sit in the various discomforts raised by Flipper and Angie’s relationship, making Jungle Fever a unique addition to Hollywood’s love affair with love affairs.

4. Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee is as much a student of cinema as he is a filmmaker, and he often works references to classic movies into his own projects. Unsurprisingly, Da 5 Bloods does feature nods to war flicks like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. However, it finds most inspiration in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as it follows a group of four Vietnam veterans—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—and Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) returning to Vietnam to find gold bars they buried during the war.

Old grudges and past hurt resurface as the men make their way to the treasure. And at the center of it all is their one missing member, their leader Stormin’ Norman Earl Holloway, who was killed in action and is played by Chadwick Boseman. Having already portrayed historical figures such as James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall, to say nothing of the superhero Black Panther, Boseman comes to the role well-suited to play a legendary soldier. That quality only intensified with Boseman’s shocking death, mere months after the release of Da 5 Bloods.

3. 25th Hour (2002)

In the 25 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, many movies have tried to capture that surreal moment of fear and fragile community. None have done it better than the first proper post-9/11 movie, 25th Hour. Although the film only occasionally references the attacks, having already been in pre-production on Sept. 11, it displays a self-destructive nation full of anger against itself, which refuses to accept its diversity, even as it realizes that diversity has always been a part of it.

Based on the novel by David Benioff, who wrote the screenplay and would later be half of Game of Thrones showrunning duo, 25th Hour stars Edward Norton as small-time drug dealer Monty Brogan. Busted for possession, Monty has one last day before he must report to prison, which he chooses to spend with his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), and his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper), an aggressive stock trader, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a private school English teacher. As he considers leaving the city for good, or spending the next seven years in Hell, Monty must face everything he loves and hates about America in general and New York City in particular, culminating a visceral monologue that is among the best scenes in Lee’s career.

2. Malcolm X (1992)

Only Spike Lee could make a Hollywood biopic about Malcom X. That was especially true in 1992 when most of America still found his message too painful to consider. Yet Lee had not only the sway to get Warner Bros. to fund the picture (often by forcing the studio’s hand, following tactics he learned from his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola), but had the vision to ensure that the picture was faithful Malcolm X’s story. Moreover, only Lee had the filmmaking chops to turn the life of Malcom X into an epic and, it must be said, entertaining movie.

Of course, it helps that Lee had his greatest collaborator Denzel Washington in the lead, an actor capable of moving past the icon to find the human being. Co-written by Lee and Arnold Perl, themselves following The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the film traces Malcom Little’s days as a hustler living in Boston during World War II to his conversion to Islam after meeting Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) to becoming the Civil Rights leader we know today. Despite coming in at more than three and a half hours, Malcom X plays like old-school Hollywood spectacle without sacrificing any of the power of the man’s message.

1. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee has never stopped innovating and experimenting. Still, there’s no denying that one of his earliest movies remains his greatest: 1989’s Do the Right Thing. The story of tensions breaking in a Brooklyn neighborhood during an extremely hot day, Do the Right Thing demonstrates everything great about Lee as a filmmaker: his formal restlessness, his love of classic Hollywood, his fearless depiction of American racism, and his interest in communal life.

Lee takes the starring role as Mookie, a young man who supports the son he has with his girlfiend Tina (Rosie Perez) by delivering pizzas for Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello). As Mookie makes his deliveries and deals with the heat, always serenaded by the records played by the all-seeing DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), he encounters all manner of citizen, including the high-strung Buggin’ Out (Esposito), Sal’s racist son Pino (John Turturro), the mysterious Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and older on again/ff again couple Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Davis). Lee draws the characters with such love that the movie’s explosion of violence at the end still feels inevitable, heartbreaking, and necessary, all these years later.

The post The 10 Best Spike Lee Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Spike Lee demanded immediate attention with his 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, and filmgoers have not been able to look away since. Not only has Lee established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers in cinema history—known for signatures such as his double dolly shot and declaring each work “A Spike Lee […]

The post The 10 Best Spike Lee Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Spike Lee demanded immediate attention with his 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, and filmgoers have not been able to look away since. Not only has Lee established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers in cinema history—known for signatures such as his double dolly shot and declaring each work “A Spike Lee Joint”—but he’s continued to innovate, pushing the form forward even 40 years into his career.

With so many entries in his filmography, ranking Spike Lee will always be a daunting task. And to help, we are just looking at his narrative features, which excludes some incredible documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke) and great concert films (The Original Kings of Comedy, American Utopia). From those features, here are the 10 most formally exhilarating, thematically challenging, and ultimately unabashedly human works from this modern American virtuoso.

10. BlackKklansman (2018)

BlackKkKlansman finally gave Lee the Oscars attention he had long deserved, with six nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s not hard to see why this was the movie that mainstream institutions decided to award, and not just because it boasts a producing credit from Jordan Peele. BlackKklansman tells an irresistible true story about a Black police officer (John David Washington) who with the help of his Jewish partner (Adam Driver) goes undercover to infiltrate the KKK in 1970s Colorado Springs.

Most directors would take the opportunity to turn in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but not Lee. Instead he uses BlackKklansman as an opportunity to comment on the relationship between popular culture and American racism, from an opening that features Alec Baldwin playing a racist choking on his rhetoric while Gone With the Wind projects behind him to a formally thrilling sequence in which enpratued Black faces dissolve onto the screen to punctuate a speech by Black Panther Kwame Ture (an electric Corey Hawkins) about Black beauty. 

9. He Got Game (1998)

Akira Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune. Martin Scorsese has Robert De Niro, and Spike Lee found his perfect muse in Denzel Washington. Washington, of course, is one of the greatest actors of his generation and has done excellent work with a variety of filmmakers. But time and again, he’s proven himself perfectly suited to embodying sometimes contradictory emotions, playing ragged and cool at the same time, often while maintaining a sense of humor. And with the basketball drama He Got Game, Lee gives Washington one of his most complicated characters.

In He Got Game, Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth, whose son Jesus (played by Jade Yorker as a boy and by NBA star Ray Allen as an adult) is on the verge of a starting a phenomenal college basketball career, sure to lead to professional stardom. Hoping to sway Jesus’ decision toward the local state university, the governor has released Jake from prison where he’s been serving a sentence for killing Jesus’ mother. Despite the messy political and legal entanglements that set up the story, He Got Game tells a rich and complicated tale about family ties and the possibilities of forgiveness, all anchored by Washington bringing humanity to a troubling person.

8. Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Music has always been a major part of Lee’s movies, from the rich Terence Blanchard scores that fill most of his movies to pop music inserts, such as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” opening Do the Right Thing. So it’s no surprise that one of Lee’s best movies would put the focus on musicians, namely the members of the jazz combo the Bleek Quintet, led by trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Washington). The Quintet starts the fracture when saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes) begins demanding more attention, and problems with girlfriends cause tensions between the members. It’s all noise that threatens to disrupt the music.

Mo’ Better Blues revisits some of Lee’s favorite themes, including the spiritual nature of art and the inability of men and women to communicate with one another. Yet the pairing of Washington and Snipes infuses those themes with a new energy, as does the fact that the movie focuses on artists themselves. Rarely has Lee made himself so present in his work, not so much in his character, the Bleek Quintet’s manager Giant, but in the struggles of artists trying to make their way throughout society.

7. Inside Man (2006)

Here’s the shocking thing about Spike Lee: yes, he’s an incredible stylist with a clear, unmistakable voice, but he’s also a perfect blockbuster filmmaker. In another world, Lee could have just devoted himself to making big budget movies about cops and robbers doing exciting adventures. Instead he just occasionally reminds us what an effective crowd-pleaser he can be by occasionally doing straightforward genre pieces like Inside Man.

Inside Man begins with a delicious caper hook, in which detective Keith Frazier (Washington) and his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) try to defuse a hostage situation that arises when criminal Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his team rob a bank. From that starting point, Inside Man unfolds a twisty narrative about war criminals and dirty secrets, complete with appearances by stars such as Willem Dafoe, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer. In the end, Inside Man isn’t a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster; it’s a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster of the highest quality.

6. School Daze (1988)

Although it doesn’t happen until the very end of his second feature, Spike Lee properly arrives as an artist when Dap (Laurence Fishburne) looks directly at the camera and shouts to the audience, “Please, wake up!” The fact that the militant Dap gets the last word in School Daze underscores the importance of his worldview for the movie. But School Daze has room for a range of personalities and perspectives, making it one of Lee’s most vibrant entries, setting the stage for the often messy but always exhilarating work he’d do throughout his career.

School Daze takes place at the Atlanta HBCU Mission College, a fictional stand in for Lee’s own alma mater Morehouse College. While Dap tries to draw attention to South African apartheid, his classmates focus their attention on more collegiate concerns. For Half-Pint (Lee), that means pledging in the Gamma Phi Gamma; for the fraternity president Dean Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito), that means keeping a low profile; meanwhile others like Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) deal with issues of beauty standards and colorism. Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama, and sometimes a musical, School Daze gives plenty of attention to the varieties of human experience, making Dap’s closing plea all the more urgent.

5. Jungle Fever (1991)

On the surface, Jungle Fever plays like an average upper-middle-class drama, the sort of thing that Hollywood has been producing for centuries. Wesley Snipes portrays architect Flipper Purify, who lives a quiet life with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee) and their daughter, despite his frustrations with bosses who won’t advance his career. When Flipper begins an affair with his new secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra), he faces judgment from his friends and family, not the least of which includes his respected father, the Good Reverend Doctor Purify (Ossie Davis).

However, Lee uses that plot to explore assumptions about race, as Flipper and Angie’s respective friend and family groups object less to the fact of an affair than they do the fact that Flipper is Black and Angie is white. As the film’s title suggests, Jungle Fever doesn’t shy away from the cultural forces that influence our perceptions and desires. Instead it allows the viewers to sit in the various discomforts raised by Flipper and Angie’s relationship, making Jungle Fever a unique addition to Hollywood’s love affair with love affairs.

4. Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee is as much a student of cinema as he is a filmmaker, and he often works references to classic movies into his own projects. Unsurprisingly, Da 5 Bloods does feature nods to war flicks like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. However, it finds most inspiration in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as it follows a group of four Vietnam veterans—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—and Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) returning to Vietnam to find gold bars they buried during the war.

Old grudges and past hurt resurface as the men make their way to the treasure. And at the center of it all is their one missing member, their leader Stormin’ Norman Earl Holloway, who was killed in action and is played by Chadwick Boseman. Having already portrayed historical figures such as James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall, to say nothing of the superhero Black Panther, Boseman comes to the role well-suited to play a legendary soldier. That quality only intensified with Boseman’s shocking death, mere months after the release of Da 5 Bloods.

3. 25th Hour (2002)

In the 25 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, many movies have tried to capture that surreal moment of fear and fragile community. None have done it better than the first proper post-9/11 movie, 25th Hour. Although the film only occasionally references the attacks, having already been in pre-production on Sept. 11, it displays a self-destructive nation full of anger against itself, which refuses to accept its diversity, even as it realizes that diversity has always been a part of it.

Based on the novel by David Benioff, who wrote the screenplay and would later be half of Game of Thrones showrunning duo, 25th Hour stars Edward Norton as small-time drug dealer Monty Brogan. Busted for possession, Monty has one last day before he must report to prison, which he chooses to spend with his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), and his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper), an aggressive stock trader, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a private school English teacher. As he considers leaving the city for good, or spending the next seven years in Hell, Monty must face everything he loves and hates about America in general and New York City in particular, culminating a visceral monologue that is among the best scenes in Lee’s career.

2. Malcolm X (1992)

Only Spike Lee could make a Hollywood biopic about Malcom X. That was especially true in 1992 when most of America still found his message too painful to consider. Yet Lee had not only the sway to get Warner Bros. to fund the picture (often by forcing the studio’s hand, following tactics he learned from his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola), but had the vision to ensure that the picture was faithful Malcolm X’s story. Moreover, only Lee had the filmmaking chops to turn the life of Malcom X into an epic and, it must be said, entertaining movie.

Of course, it helps that Lee had his greatest collaborator Denzel Washington in the lead, an actor capable of moving past the icon to find the human being. Co-written by Lee and Arnold Perl, themselves following The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the film traces Malcom Little’s days as a hustler living in Boston during World War II to his conversion to Islam after meeting Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) to becoming the Civil Rights leader we know today. Despite coming in at more than three and a half hours, Malcom X plays like old-school Hollywood spectacle without sacrificing any of the power of the man’s message.

1. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee has never stopped innovating and experimenting. Still, there’s no denying that one of his earliest movies remains his greatest: 1989’s Do the Right Thing. The story of tensions breaking in a Brooklyn neighborhood during an extremely hot day, Do the Right Thing demonstrates everything great about Lee as a filmmaker: his formal restlessness, his love of classic Hollywood, his fearless depiction of American racism, and his interest in communal life.

Lee takes the starring role as Mookie, a young man who supports the son he has with his girlfiend Tina (Rosie Perez) by delivering pizzas for Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello). As Mookie makes his deliveries and deals with the heat, always serenaded by the records played by the all-seeing DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), he encounters all manner of citizen, including the high-strung Buggin’ Out (Esposito), Sal’s racist son Pino (John Turturro), the mysterious Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and older on again/ff again couple Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Davis). Lee draws the characters with such love that the movie’s explosion of violence at the end still feels inevitable, heartbreaking, and necessary, all these years later.

The post The 10 Best Spike Lee Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

Ask them. Yes, that’s the boring answer, but it’s also the most effective one of the bunch. Of course, being up front about it could lead to embarrassment, even though we live in a day and age where Dungeons & Dragons appears more and more in mainstream media.

So, if asking them directly is out of the question, we’ve developed a few ways to tell if they may or may not be interested in D&D. We’re considering two different kinds of people here: those that already know about D&D, and those with characteristics that would make them the ideal party member for a session.

The post How to Figure Out if Your Coworker is into D&D appeared first on Den of Geek.

Spike Lee demanded immediate attention with his 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It, and filmgoers have not been able to look away since. Not only has Lee established himself as one of the most distinctive filmmakers in cinema history—known for signatures such as his double dolly shot and declaring each work “A Spike Lee Joint”—but he’s continued to innovate, pushing the form forward even 40 years into his career.

With so many entries in his filmography, ranking Spike Lee will always be a daunting task. And to help, we are just looking at his narrative features, which excludes some incredible documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke) and great concert films (The Original Kings of Comedy, American Utopia). From those features, here are the 10 most formally exhilarating, thematically challenging, and ultimately unabashedly human works from this modern American virtuoso.

10. BlackKklansman (2018)

BlackKkKlansman finally gave Lee the Oscars attention he had long deserved, with six nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s not hard to see why this was the movie that mainstream institutions decided to award, and not just because it boasts a producing credit from Jordan Peele. BlackKklansman tells an irresistible true story about a Black police officer (John David Washington) who with the help of his Jewish partner (Adam Driver) goes undercover to infiltrate the KKK in 1970s Colorado Springs.

Most directors would take the opportunity to turn in a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but not Lee. Instead he uses BlackKklansman as an opportunity to comment on the relationship between popular culture and American racism, from an opening that features Alec Baldwin playing a racist choking on his rhetoric while Gone With the Wind projects behind him to a formally thrilling sequence in which enpratued Black faces dissolve onto the screen to punctuate a speech by Black Panther Kwame Ture (an electric Corey Hawkins) about Black beauty. 

9. He Got Game (1998)

Akira Kurosawa had Toshiro Mifune. Martin Scorsese has Robert De Niro, and Spike Lee found his perfect muse in Denzel Washington. Washington, of course, is one of the greatest actors of his generation and has done excellent work with a variety of filmmakers. But time and again, he’s proven himself perfectly suited to embodying sometimes contradictory emotions, playing ragged and cool at the same time, often while maintaining a sense of humor. And with the basketball drama He Got Game, Lee gives Washington one of his most complicated characters.

In He Got Game, Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth, whose son Jesus (played by Jade Yorker as a boy and by NBA star Ray Allen as an adult) is on the verge of a starting a phenomenal college basketball career, sure to lead to professional stardom. Hoping to sway Jesus’ decision toward the local state university, the governor has released Jake from prison where he’s been serving a sentence for killing Jesus’ mother. Despite the messy political and legal entanglements that set up the story, He Got Game tells a rich and complicated tale about family ties and the possibilities of forgiveness, all anchored by Washington bringing humanity to a troubling person.

8. Mo’ Better Blues (1990)

Music has always been a major part of Lee’s movies, from the rich Terence Blanchard scores that fill most of his movies to pop music inserts, such as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” opening Do the Right Thing. So it’s no surprise that one of Lee’s best movies would put the focus on musicians, namely the members of the jazz combo the Bleek Quintet, led by trumpeter Bleek Gilliam (Washington). The Quintet starts the fracture when saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes) begins demanding more attention, and problems with girlfriends cause tensions between the members. It’s all noise that threatens to disrupt the music.

Mo’ Better Blues revisits some of Lee’s favorite themes, including the spiritual nature of art and the inability of men and women to communicate with one another. Yet the pairing of Washington and Snipes infuses those themes with a new energy, as does the fact that the movie focuses on artists themselves. Rarely has Lee made himself so present in his work, not so much in his character, the Bleek Quintet’s manager Giant, but in the struggles of artists trying to make their way throughout society.

7. Inside Man (2006)

Here’s the shocking thing about Spike Lee: yes, he’s an incredible stylist with a clear, unmistakable voice, but he’s also a perfect blockbuster filmmaker. In another world, Lee could have just devoted himself to making big budget movies about cops and robbers doing exciting adventures. Instead he just occasionally reminds us what an effective crowd-pleaser he can be by occasionally doing straightforward genre pieces like Inside Man.

Inside Man begins with a delicious caper hook, in which detective Keith Frazier (Washington) and his partner Bill Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) try to defuse a hostage situation that arises when criminal Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) and his team rob a bank. From that starting point, Inside Man unfolds a twisty narrative about war criminals and dirty secrets, complete with appearances by stars such as Willem Dafoe, Jodie Foster, and Christopher Plummer. In the end, Inside Man isn’t a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster; it’s a big, glossy Hollywood blockbuster of the highest quality.

6. School Daze (1988)

Although it doesn’t happen until the very end of his second feature, Spike Lee properly arrives as an artist when Dap (Laurence Fishburne) looks directly at the camera and shouts to the audience, “Please, wake up!” The fact that the militant Dap gets the last word in School Daze underscores the importance of his worldview for the movie. But School Daze has room for a range of personalities and perspectives, making it one of Lee’s most vibrant entries, setting the stage for the often messy but always exhilarating work he’d do throughout his career.

School Daze takes place at the Atlanta HBCU Mission College, a fictional stand in for Lee’s own alma mater Morehouse College. While Dap tries to draw attention to South African apartheid, his classmates focus their attention on more collegiate concerns. For Half-Pint (Lee), that means pledging in the Gamma Phi Gamma; for the fraternity president Dean Big Brother Almighty (Giancarlo Esposito), that means keeping a low profile; meanwhile others like Jane Toussaint (Tisha Campbell) deal with issues of beauty standards and colorism. Sometimes a comedy, sometimes a drama, and sometimes a musical, School Daze gives plenty of attention to the varieties of human experience, making Dap’s closing plea all the more urgent.

5. Jungle Fever (1991)

On the surface, Jungle Fever plays like an average upper-middle-class drama, the sort of thing that Hollywood has been producing for centuries. Wesley Snipes portrays architect Flipper Purify, who lives a quiet life with his wife Drew (Lonette McKee) and their daughter, despite his frustrations with bosses who won’t advance his career. When Flipper begins an affair with his new secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra), he faces judgment from his friends and family, not the least of which includes his respected father, the Good Reverend Doctor Purify (Ossie Davis).

However, Lee uses that plot to explore assumptions about race, as Flipper and Angie’s respective friend and family groups object less to the fact of an affair than they do the fact that Flipper is Black and Angie is white. As the film’s title suggests, Jungle Fever doesn’t shy away from the cultural forces that influence our perceptions and desires. Instead it allows the viewers to sit in the various discomforts raised by Flipper and Angie’s relationship, making Jungle Fever a unique addition to Hollywood’s love affair with love affairs.

4. Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee is as much a student of cinema as he is a filmmaker, and he often works references to classic movies into his own projects. Unsurprisingly, Da 5 Bloods does feature nods to war flicks like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. However, it finds most inspiration in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, as it follows a group of four Vietnam veterans—Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—and Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) returning to Vietnam to find gold bars they buried during the war.

Old grudges and past hurt resurface as the men make their way to the treasure. And at the center of it all is their one missing member, their leader Stormin’ Norman Earl Holloway, who was killed in action and is played by Chadwick Boseman. Having already portrayed historical figures such as James Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall, to say nothing of the superhero Black Panther, Boseman comes to the role well-suited to play a legendary soldier. That quality only intensified with Boseman’s shocking death, mere months after the release of Da 5 Bloods.

3. 25th Hour (2002)

In the 25 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, many movies have tried to capture that surreal moment of fear and fragile community. None have done it better than the first proper post-9/11 movie, 25th Hour. Although the film only occasionally references the attacks, having already been in pre-production on Sept. 11, it displays a self-destructive nation full of anger against itself, which refuses to accept its diversity, even as it realizes that diversity has always been a part of it.

Based on the novel by David Benioff, who wrote the screenplay and would later be half of Game of Thrones showrunning duo, 25th Hour stars Edward Norton as small-time drug dealer Monty Brogan. Busted for possession, Monty has one last day before he must report to prison, which he chooses to spend with his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), and his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper), an aggressive stock trader, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a private school English teacher. As he considers leaving the city for good, or spending the next seven years in Hell, Monty must face everything he loves and hates about America in general and New York City in particular, culminating a visceral monologue that is among the best scenes in Lee’s career.

2. Malcolm X (1992)

Only Spike Lee could make a Hollywood biopic about Malcom X. That was especially true in 1992 when most of America still found his message too painful to consider. Yet Lee had not only the sway to get Warner Bros. to fund the picture (often by forcing the studio’s hand, following tactics he learned from his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola), but had the vision to ensure that the picture was faithful Malcolm X’s story. Moreover, only Lee had the filmmaking chops to turn the life of Malcom X into an epic and, it must be said, entertaining movie.

Of course, it helps that Lee had his greatest collaborator Denzel Washington in the lead, an actor capable of moving past the icon to find the human being. Co-written by Lee and Arnold Perl, themselves following The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the film traces Malcom Little’s days as a hustler living in Boston during World War II to his conversion to Islam after meeting Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) to becoming the Civil Rights leader we know today. Despite coming in at more than three and a half hours, Malcom X plays like old-school Hollywood spectacle without sacrificing any of the power of the man’s message.

1. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Spike Lee has never stopped innovating and experimenting. Still, there’s no denying that one of his earliest movies remains his greatest: 1989’s Do the Right Thing. The story of tensions breaking in a Brooklyn neighborhood during an extremely hot day, Do the Right Thing demonstrates everything great about Lee as a filmmaker: his formal restlessness, his love of classic Hollywood, his fearless depiction of American racism, and his interest in communal life.

Lee takes the starring role as Mookie, a young man who supports the son he has with his girlfiend Tina (Rosie Perez) by delivering pizzas for Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello). As Mookie makes his deliveries and deals with the heat, always serenaded by the records played by the all-seeing DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), he encounters all manner of citizen, including the high-strung Buggin’ Out (Esposito), Sal’s racist son Pino (John Turturro), the mysterious Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and older on again/ff again couple Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Davis). Lee draws the characters with such love that the movie’s explosion of violence at the end still feels inevitable, heartbreaking, and necessary, all these years later.

The post The 10 Best Spike Lee Movies Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task. 

But on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister took everyone by surprise. It was a cold, wet day in Oxford, England—conditions no one expected to lend themselves to record-setting—and yet Bannister did just that, running a mile in 3:59.4 and becoming the first person in the record books to run a mile in under four minutes. 

This shift in the benchmark had profound effects; the world now knew that the four-minute mile was possible. Bannister’s record lasted only forty-six days, when it was snatched away by Australian runner John Landy. Then a year later, three runners all beat the four-minute barrier together in the same race. Since then, over 1,400 runners have officially run a mile in under four minutes; the current record is 3:43.13, held by Moroccan athlete Hicham El Guerrouj.

We achieve far more when we believe that something is possible, and we will believe it’s possible only when we see someone else has already done it—and as with human running speed, so it is with what we believe are the hard limits for how a website needs to perform.

Establishing standards for a sustainable web

In most major industries, the key metrics of environmental performance are fairly well established, such as miles per gallon for cars or energy per square meter for homes. The tools and methods for calculating those metrics are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same page when doing environmental assessments. In the world of websites and apps, however, we aren’t held to any particular environmental standards, and only recently have gained the tools and methods we need to even make an environmental assessment.

The primary goal in sustainable web design is to reduce carbon emissions. However, it’s almost impossible to actually measure the amount of CO₂ produced by a web product. We can’t measure the fumes coming out of the exhaust pipes on our laptops. The emissions of our websites are far away, out of sight and out of mind, coming out of power stations burning coal and gas. We have no way to trace the electrons from a website or app back to the power station where the electricity is being generated and actually know the exact amount of greenhouse gas produced. So what do we do? 

If we can’t measure the actual carbon emissions, then we need to find what we can measure. The primary factors that could be used as indicators of carbon emissions are:

1. Data transfer 
2. Carbon intensity of electricity

Let’s take a look at how we can use these metrics to quantify the energy consumption, and in turn the carbon footprint, of the websites and web apps we create.

Data transfer

Most researchers use kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (kWh/GB) as a metric of energy efficiency when measuring the amount of data transferred over the internet when a website or application is used. This provides a great reference point for energy consumption and carbon emissions. As a rule of thumb, the more data transferred, the more energy used in the data center, telecoms networks, and end user devices.

For web pages, data transfer for a single visit can be most easily estimated by measuring the page weight, meaning the transfer size of the page in kilobytes the first time someone visits the page. It’s fairly easy to measure using the developer tools in any modern web browser. Often your web hosting account will include statistics for the total data transfer of any web application (Fig 2.1).

The nice thing about page weight as a metric is that it allows us to compare the efficiency of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the issue with constantly changing traffic volumes. 

Reducing page weight requires a large scope. By early 2020, the median page weight was 1.97 MB for setups the HTTP Archive classifies as “desktop” and 1.77 MB for “mobile,” with desktop increasing 36 percent since January 2016 and mobile page weights nearly doubling in the same period (Fig 2.2). Roughly half of this data transfer is image files, making images the single biggest source of carbon emissions on the average website. 

History clearly shows us that our web pages can be smaller, if only we set our minds to it. While most technologies become ever more energy efficient, including the underlying technology of the web such as data centers and transmission networks, websites themselves are a technology that becomes less efficient as time goes on.

You might be familiar with the concept of performance budgeting as a way of focusing a project team on creating faster user experiences. For example, we might specify that the website must load in a maximum of one second on a broadband connection and three seconds on a 3G connection. Much like speed limits while driving, performance budgets are upper limits rather than vague suggestions, so the goal should always be to come in under budget.

Designing for fast performance does often lead to reduced data transfer and emissions, but it isn’t always the case. Web performance is often more about the subjective perception of load times than it is about the true efficiency of the underlying system, whereas page weight and transfer size are more objective measures and more reliable benchmarks for sustainable web design. 

We can set a page weight budget in reference to a benchmark of industry averages, using data from sources like HTTP Archive. We can also benchmark page weight against competitors or the old version of the website we’re replacing. For example, we might set a maximum page weight budget as equal to our most efficient competitor, or we could set the benchmark lower to guarantee we are best in class. 

If we want to take it to the next level, then we could also start looking at the transfer size of our web pages for repeat visitors. Although page weight for the first time someone visits is the easiest thing to measure, and easy to compare on a like-for-like basis, we can learn even more if we start looking at transfer size in other scenarios too. For example, visitors who load the same page multiple times will likely have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, meaning they don’t need to transfer all of the files on subsequent visits. Likewise, a visitor who navigates to new pages on the same website will likely not need to load the full page each time, as some global assets from areas like the header and footer may already be cached in their browser. Measuring transfer size at this next level of detail can help us learn even more about how we can optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages, and enable us to set page weight budgets for additional scenarios beyond the first visit.

Page weight budgets are easy to track throughout a design and development process. Although they don’t actually tell us carbon emission and energy consumption analytics directly, they give us a clear indication of efficiency relative to other websites. And as transfer size is an effective analog for energy consumption, we can actually use it to estimate energy consumption too.

In summary, reduced data transfer translates to energy efficiency, a key factor to reducing carbon emissions of web products. The more efficient our products, the less electricity they use, and the less fossil fuels need to be burned to produce the electricity to power them. But as we’ll see next, since all web products demand some power, it’s important to consider the source of that electricity, too.

Carbon intensity of electricity

Regardless of energy efficiency, the level of pollution caused by digital products depends on the carbon intensity of the energy being used to power them. Carbon intensity is a term used to define the grams of CO₂ produced for every kilowatt-hour of electricity (gCO₂/kWh). This varies widely, with renewable energy sources and nuclear having an extremely low carbon intensity of less than 10 gCO₂/kWh (even when factoring in their construction); whereas fossil fuels have very high carbon intensity of approximately 200–400 gCO₂/kWh. 

Most electricity comes from national or state grids, where energy from a variety of different sources is mixed together with varying levels of carbon intensity. The distributed nature of the internet means that a single user of a website or app might be using energy from multiple different grids simultaneously; a website user in Paris uses electricity from the French national grid to power their home internet and devices, but the website’s data center could be in Dallas, USA, pulling electricity from the Texas grid, while the telecoms networks use energy from everywhere between Dallas and Paris.

We don’t have control over the full energy supply of web services, but we do have some control over where we host our projects. With a data center using a significant proportion of the energy of any website, locating the data center in an area with low carbon energy will tangibly reduce its carbon emissions. Danish startup Tomorrow reports and maps this user-contributed data, and a glance at their map shows how, for example, choosing a data center in France will have significantly lower carbon emissions than a data center in the Netherlands (Fig 2.3).

That said, we don’t want to locate our servers too far away from our users; it takes energy to transmit data through the telecom’s networks, and the further the data travels, the more energy is consumed. Just like food miles, we can think of the distance from the data center to the website’s core user base as “megabyte miles”—and we want it to be as small as possible.

Using the distance itself as a benchmark, we can use website analytics to identify the country, state, or even city where our core user group is located and measure the distance from that location to the data center used by our hosting company. This will be a somewhat fuzzy metric as we don’t know the precise center of mass of our users or the exact location of a data center, but we can at least get a rough idea. 

For example, if a website is hosted in London but the primary user base is on the West Coast of the USA, then we could look up the distance from London to San Francisco, which is 5,300 miles. That’s a long way! We can see that hosting it somewhere in North America, ideally on the West Coast, would significantly reduce the distance and thus the energy used to transmit the data. In addition, locating our servers closer to our visitors helps reduce latency and delivers better user experience, so it’s a win-win.

Converting it back to carbon emissions

If we combine carbon intensity with a calculation for energy consumption, we can calculate the carbon emissions of our websites and apps. A tool my team created does this by measuring the data transfer over the wire when loading a web page, calculating the amount of electricity associated, and then converting that into a figure for CO₂ (Fig 2.4). It also factors in whether or not the web hosting is powered by renewable energy.

If you want to take it to the next level and tailor the data more accurately to the unique aspects of your project, the Energy and Emissions Worksheet accompanying this book shows you how.

With the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects, we could actually take a page weight budget one step further and set carbon budgets as well. CO₂ is not a metric commonly used in web projects; we’re more familiar with kilobytes and megabytes, and can fairly easily look at design options and files to assess how big they are. Translating that into carbon adds a layer of abstraction that isn’t as intuitive—but carbon budgets do focus our minds on the primary thing we’re trying to reduce, and support the core objective of sustainable web design: reducing carbon emissions.

Browser Energy

Data transfer might be the simplest and most complete analog for energy consumption in our digital projects, but by giving us one number to represent the energy used in the data center, the telecoms networks, and the end user’s devices, it can’t offer us insights into the efficiency in any specific part of the system.

One part of the system we can look at in more detail is the energy used by end users’ devices. As front-end web technologies become more advanced, the computational load is increasingly moving from the data center to users’ devices, whether they be phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or even smart TVs. Modern web browsers allow us to implement more complex styling and animation on the fly using CSS and JavaScript. Furthermore, JavaScript libraries such as Angular and React allow us to create applications where the “thinking” work is done partly or entirely in the browser. 

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more computation in the user’s web browser means more energy used by their devices. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a heavy processing load on the user’s device can inadvertently exclude users with older, slower devices and cause batteries on phones and laptops to drain faster. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. This isn’t just bad for the environment, but it puts a disproportionate financial burden on the poorest in society.

In part because the tools are limited, and partly because there are so many different models of devices, it’s difficult to measure website energy consumption on end users’ devices. One tool we do currently have is the Energy Impact monitor inside the developer console of the Safari browser (Fig 2.5).

You know when you load a website and your computer’s cooling fans start spinning so frantically you think it might actually take off? That’s essentially what this tool is measuring. 

It shows us the percentage of CPU used and the duration of CPU usage when loading the web page, and uses these figures to generate an energy impact rating. It doesn’t give us precise data for the amount of electricity used in kilowatts, but the information it does provide can be used to benchmark how efficiently your websites use energy and set targets for improvement.