BlacKkKlansman
Academy Award × 1
Rent/Purchase
Colorado Springs, late 1970s. Ron Stallworth, an African American police officer, and Flip Zimmerman, his Jewish colleague, run an undercover operation to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.
What critics thought
BlacKkKlansman landed as one of Lee's most celebrated films in years, with critics broadly praising its fury, its political urgency, and Adam Driver's layered undercover performance — though a handful found its tonal balance unsteady compared to sharper recent satires on the same themes. The film's most pointed controversy came not from mainstream critics but from filmmaker Boots Riley, who argued it romanticizes policing and sanitizes real history in ways that undercut its radical posture.
“far more frightening than it is funny”
David Ehrlich·IndieWire
“It's an entertaining spectacle but the brilliant tonal balance in something like Jordan Peele's satire Get Out leaves this looking a little exposed. Yet it responds fiercely, contemptuously to the crassness at the heart of the Trump regime and gleefully pays it back in its own coin”
Peter Bradshaw·The Guardian
“Maybe not everyone who is white is a racist, but racism is what makes us white. Don't sleep on this movie.”
A. O. Scott·The New York Times
“Lee himself has a propagandist streak, and he knows nothing ever sold the message of white emasculation and the existential necessity of keeping blacks down as well as Griffith's 1915 film. It revived the Klan and—insult to injury—is still reckoned a landmark of narrative filmmaking. If there were no other reason to make BlackkKlansman, this one would be good enough.”
David Edelstein·Vulture
Genres
Biography, Comedy, Crime
Cast & Crew
DirectorSpike Lee
StarringJohn David Washington, Adam Driver, Topher Grace, Laura Harrier, Alec Baldwin
ComposerTerence Blanchard
BlacKkKlansman
Academy Award × 1
Colorado Springs, late 1970s. Ron Stallworth, an African American police officer, and Flip Zimmerman, his Jewish colleague, run an undercover operation to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.
What critics thought
BlacKkKlansman landed as one of Lee's most celebrated films in years, with critics broadly praising its fury, its political urgency, and Adam Driver's layered undercover performance — though a handful found its tonal balance unsteady compared to sharper recent satires on the same themes. The film's most pointed controversy came not from mainstream critics but from filmmaker Boots Riley, who argued it romanticizes policing and sanitizes real history in ways that undercut its radical posture.
“far more frightening than it is funny”
David Ehrlich·IndieWire
“It's an entertaining spectacle but the brilliant tonal balance in something like Jordan Peele's satire Get Out leaves this looking a little exposed. Yet it responds fiercely, contemptuously to the crassness at the heart of the Trump regime and gleefully pays it back in its own coin”
Peter Bradshaw·The Guardian
“Maybe not everyone who is white is a racist, but racism is what makes us white. Don't sleep on this movie.”
A. O. Scott·The New York Times
“Lee himself has a propagandist streak, and he knows nothing ever sold the message of white emasculation and the existential necessity of keeping blacks down as well as Griffith's 1915 film. It revived the Klan and—insult to injury—is still reckoned a landmark of narrative filmmaking. If there were no other reason to make BlackkKlansman, this one would be good enough.”
David Edelstein·Vulture
Genres
Biography, Comedy, Crime
Cast & Crew
DirectorSpike Lee
StarringJohn David Washington, Adam Driver, Topher Grace, Laura Harrier, Alec Baldwin
ComposerTerence Blanchard
Rent/Purchase