Spike Lee returns to form with a true-life story that works as comedy, crime drama and political alarm-bell all at once.
Chicago Reader August 8, 2018 Lee wants to explain how images in popular culture have social and political consequences-a vital message.
Rat-a-tat zeitgeist entertainment that feels as timely as breaking news.
The Guardian May 15, 2018 Spike Lee hits his targets effectively enough – again and again. They keep popping back up like the targets in a fairground shooting gall...
If the movie aims to make complacent white people feel uncomfortable about their role in the current American turmoil, it fails spectacularly.
As much a compelling black empowerment story as it is an electrifying commentary on the problems of African-American representation across more tha...
Spike Lee styles the film as a popular entertainment, forgoing the theatrical satire typical of his late-period state-of-the-nation joints, li...
New York Times August 9, 2018 Don’t sleep on this movie.
guidelive.com August 9, 2018 It’s not pretty, which is one reason for the touches of comedy: Sometimes you need to laugh to keep from screaming.
What I especially love is how the movie refuses to offer up any pat or easy answers.
BlacKkKlansman’s joke is an indictment of complacency, particularly that of white liberals who’d rather not confront the distressing fa...
A kitchen sink and kaleidoscopic study of cultural and institutional racism in America.
It’s just about perfect in balance of tone, and it’s easily Spike Lee’s best film in years.
This is a film whose broad comedy smuggles dead-serious contraband, a Trojan horse with a 1970s afro. It’s not a comfortable combin...
A heady hybrid of comedy, polemic and period crime drama.
The Guardian August 26, 2018 BlacKkKlansman slips seamlessly from borderline-absurdist humour to all-too-real horror, conjuring an urgent blend of sociopolitical period satire...
Boston Globe August 9, 2018 One of the director’s strongest yet most entertaining works in years.
RogerEbert.com August 7, 2018 [Lee] is firing on all cylinders here. BlacKkKlansman is a true conversation starter, and probably a conversation ender as well.
BlacKkKlansman captures the absurd aspects of this story, while still drawing parallels that make the movie feel urgent and dishearteningly relevan...
Lee’s overarching point… is that we have not come very far at all from the early 1970s. His aesthetic in BlacKkKlansman is that, in maki...
You are never in any doubt that you are watching a 2018 movie that is less interested in the past for its own sake than for what it can t...
Financial Times August 22, 2018 BlacKkKlansman’s determination to be everything for everybody – comedy/ melodrama, wish-fulfilment fable/awful warning – proves its...
TIME Magazine May 15, 2018 This is an angry film as well as a hugely entertaining one, and Lee has complete control over its shifting tone, minute by minute.
If "BlacKkKlansman" is not above turning its characters into mouthpieces for its ideas, it wards off excessive didacticism by giving those ideas a...
Spike Lee is an audacious filmmaker who crosses boundaries and deliberately blurs drama and reality. Never has this been more effective than in Bla...
[Lee] is not only still on fire but has found a story that allows him to be as excited and involved as he was when it all began.
Just as Lee reminds us of his talent and the way it’s been overlooked, he also reminds us of what he’s been trying to tell us about Ame...
There’s serious tension in BlackkKlansman’s situation, and the film embraces the shifts in mood with shifts in filmmaking style that al...
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years, from composer Terence Blanchard...
Rolling Stone August 8, 2018 Spike Lee’s hellraiser about a black cop who infiltrated the KKK in the 1970s is also an incendiary indictment of our current Trump moment an...
New Yorker August 13, 2018 For all its revelations of racist rot at the core of American society, Lee also offers a clear, specific, and wondrous, if wary, view of chang...
An entertaining jaunt through the '70s, with some dutiful grappling over the enduring question of race in America thrown in…
BlacKkKlansman is one of Spike Lee’s most accomplished films in recent memory, and one of the best films of 2018.
Lee doesn’t do subtlety. But the movie is very entertaining and comes with a stupendous, lushly melodic score by Terence Blanchard.
Spike’s back, so back. BlacKkKlansman is a brilliant satire, a trenchant political statement and a love/hate letter to America, wa...
The Age (Australia) September 14, 2018 There’s nobody left in Hollywood making broad, sweeping, lively political melodramas like Spike Lee.
News.com.au August 19, 2018 Spike Lee isn’t subtle, his is a sledgehammer approach. But being delicate wasn’t the point. This is a film that needs to be seen.
New York Post August 10, 2018 Lee heightens the nervy tone with strong visuals, juxtaposing a '70s blaxploitation aesthetic with the Klan’s suffocating suburban décor...
San Diego Reader August 10, 2018 Not since Bamboozled has a Spike Lee joint been this blunt and tightly rolled.
This could well be a commercial success. It’s a blockbuster of an American film and it was much needed…
Shadow and Act August 7, 2018 While much of the film is dark and triggering, moments of happiness and humor sprinkled throughout the narrative help keep the audience focused and...
Filmspotting August 24, 2018 …a movie that has to be reckoned with, about a subject that we seem doomed – hopelessly -- to reckon with.
Toronto Star August 9, 2018 Set in the late 1970s but informed by the here and now, it’s fuelled by righteous anger against racial hatred and anti-Semitism, leavene...
Refinery29 August 9, 2018 [It’s] a film that deftly melds wit and social commentary, compounded by a horrifying end crescendo that’s impossible to look...
New Yorker August 13, 2018 Lee would contend, I guess, that the sober approach will no longer suffice-that the age we inhabit is too drunk on its own craziness. He has a...
"BlacKkKlansman" is a sobering, affecting commentary on right now, yet it’s also a thrilling celebration of real brotherhood ...
This is one of his best films because he marries the anger and intensity with the restraint and poetry that he’s so good at visually.
Globe and Mail August 10, 2018 Lee shifts from silly spoof to dramatic chill in a heartbeat. As an entertainment that milks its audience’s outrage against racism, Blac...
Independent August 22, 2018 BlacKkKlansman blends comic irony and outspoken polemic but still works very effectively as a hardboiled crime drama.
812filmreviews August 26, 2018 Spike Lee is one of the best directors of his generation. BlacKKKlansman assures him of that title
The Klan and the idiocy of their ideology are repeatedly and effectively skewered.
Its fiery message couldn’t be more timely – and its rage more justified.
The Atlantic August 9, 2018 Rather than letting the audience reassure themselves that the story is rooted in the past, Lee firmly points the film’s conclusion to the pre...
Sight & Sound May 17, 2018 BlacKkKlansman is a fairy tale in which plucky underdogs run rings around violent idiots. Yet this victory is hollow, and Lee knows it.
It was history written with lightning. BlaKkKlansman is a deafening roll of the thunder we’ve been waiting for ever since.
If you don’t like Lee’s oeuvre or are offended by openly political movies, this isn’t the film for you. Others will find in BlacK...
This is pure Lee, at times both scathingly satirical and trenchantly earnest…[but] Lee has become a master director who has forgotten how to tell&n...
Until the closing shots of BlacKkKlansman, director and co-writer Spike Lee does more than control the rage. He refines it with riotous wit into&nb...
Before taking a dark swerve into chilling verité at the close, BlacKkKlansman … kicks up suggestions of the pilot for a great 1970s misma...
I haven’t read Stallworth’s book, so I don’t know precisely how much of Lee’s movie is fact versus dramatization, but...
Movie Mom August 10, 2018 With Stallworth’s remarkable true and timely story and Washington’s star-making performance, one of Lee’s all-time best, most pur...
The film’s masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.
Empire Magazine August 9, 2018 There are few filmmakers as consistently, burningly passionate as Spike Lee. This is vital and timely work that’s up there with his best, wit...
BlacKkKlansman… [has] a blunt power that’s terribly, painfully persuasive.
New Yorker August 14, 2018 Stallworth recognizes that "white voice" is a seductive fiction, like many of the customs of association cherished within the K.K.K.
NOW Toronto August 9, 2018 BlackKklansmen is messy and conflicted in that way, working through its own identity crisis, not necessarily on purpose, but the result is fitting...
Lee never takes his eye off the connecting thread between the events of 1978 and the present. The result is one of his most flat-out ente...
Lee’s most flat-out entertaining film in quite a long time, as well as his most commercial.
BlacKkKlansman uses history to illustrate how we’re repeating it.
New Statesman August 17, 2018 Lee’s motivating anger produces a unique, electrifying charge.
Lee’s most entertaining and thought-provoking film in years.
The filmmaker rips from the headlines, but the struggles remain the same.
Village Voice May 15, 2018 I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie exploit its tonal mismatches so voraciously and purposefully.
BlacKkKlansman, is quintessential Spike Lee, impassioned and messy and vital as anything he’s done in decades.
Spike Lee’s new film empowers audiences to stand up for change. Talking isn’t enough; you must do the right thing.
This freewheeling account of an African-American cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1970s is problematic as narrative drama, bu...
Spike Lee’s best film for years.
Detroit News August 10, 2018 Lee is a true auteur, and at 61, he remains a defiant, daring, gutsy, visionary filmmaker.
