Edward Norton sits on a bench with his snarling dog in an illustration of a scene from Spike Lee's 25th Hour by artist Marc Aspinall
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.
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.
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.