Summer of Sam uses the Son of Sam as a kind of roving metaphor, the face of the toxicity that beats in Vinny’s heart and the conflict that troubles Ritchie’s soul, the name of the lusts and fears that well within each man in equal measure.
Spike Lee's 25th Hour is a movie about unwanted change, about forced adaptation, about how our choices have consequences we can’t understand and can’t foresee, about how our identities are impossible-to-parse combinations of nature and nurture and nationalism, about how the myth of the American dream is persistent and prolonged and relies on our performance of it.
Public Enemy's “Fight The Power” isn’t just the theme music of Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing—it’s the film’s constant, beating heart.
What a fight! What a night! What a testament to an unmatched body of work by the one and only Mr. Spike Lee.
Of the more than 80 film and television scores Terence Blanchard has composed in the last 33 years, his work for Spike Lee's Jungle Fever—the first full film score of his (blessedly still in-progress) career—is its own skeleton key for an artist of restless melodic innovation and excavation.
Inside Man and Da 5 Bloods stick out from the rest of Lee’s catalog—and from other directors’s outings in the same genre—because of how they weave an incisive, layered argument about war, money and power into their narrative structures.
Spike Lee's openings match his movies as a whole: bold with a sense of cinematic tradition.