BlacKkKlansman
Focus Features | Release Date: August 10, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
83
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 56 Critic Reviews
Positive:
54
Mixed:
1
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
CineVueAlasdair BaymanAug 26, 2018
No film of Lee’s would be cut without portraits, cross cutting, dual images or his iconic double dolly shot. All featuring heavily, these practises of his style come to elevate the genre filmmaking to new heights. Read full review
100
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiAug 10, 2018
The tale is so bizarre that it’s sometimes comical, and often disturbing. The unrelentingly intense BlacKkKlansman can be very hard to watch. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleAug 9, 2018
Spike Lee is relevant again. He's necessary again. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. ScottAug 9, 2018
BlacKkKlansman is a furious, funny, blunt and brilliant confrontation with the truth. It’s an alarm clock ringing in the midst of a historical nightmare, and also a symphony, the rare piece of political popular art that works in all three dimensions. Read full review
100
ConsequenceBlake GobleAug 8, 2018
BlacKkKlansman is a well-formed and compelling work of pulp escapism. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperAug 8, 2018
BlacKkKlansman is one of Spike Lee’s most accomplished films in recent memory, and one of the best films of 2018. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comOdie HendersonAug 7, 2018
BlacKkKlansman presents racism as a dichotomy between the absurd and the dangerous; the film’s intentional laughs often get caught in one’s throat. Read full review
100
TimeStephanie ZacharekMay 15, 2018
BlacKkKlansman is both hilarious and exquisitely direct, and had it been made before November 2016, you might call Lee’s approach a little alarmist. But if anything, he’s restrained. This is an angry film as well as a hugely entertaining one, and Lee has complete control over its shifting tone, minute by minute. Read full review
95
IGNWilliam BibbianiAug 9, 2018
One of Spike Lee’s best movies. With a dynamite cast, sharp script and pointed humor that underscores real-life, disturbing horrors, it’s an entertaining crime drama that amuses and shocks and invites the audience into a complex and impassioned conversation about the power of racism - and the moving image - to influence our lives. Read full review
90
NPRBob MondelloAug 23, 2018
If hate groups were insidious four decades ago, argues Lee in his most ferociously entertaining (and just plain ferocious) film in years, how much more dangerous are they today? Read full review
90
The New YorkerAnthony LaneAug 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 point. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzAug 7, 2018
BlacKkKlansman is Spike Lee’s best movie in years, bringing together everything that makes him such a dynamic, exciting, urgent filmmaker – as well as some of what can drive you crazy about him, too. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranAug 7, 2018
Working with longtime editor Barry Alexander Brown, the director casually but fearlessly stirs things up, balancing brutal satiric comedy, unapologetic social commentary, convincing jeopardy, even appealing romance. Read full review
90
Rolling StonePeter TraversAug 6, 2018
Spike Lee is coming at you with his greatest and most galvanizing movie in years. BlacKkKlansman is right up there with "Do the Right Thing" and "Malcolm X" in the Spike’s Joint pantheon of game-changers. Read full review
90
Village VoiceBilge EbiriMay 16, 2018
It’s alternatingly comic, heroic, tragic, horrifying, ridiculous, dead serious, clear-eyed, and confused; it shifts into moments of documentary and even essay film, but it’s also one of Lee’s more entertaining and vibrantly constructed works. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie exploit its tonal mismatches so voraciously and purposefully. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)Emily YoshidaMay 14, 2018
BlacKkKlansman is a nuanced story of race in America, but Lee doesn’t take any chances with vagueness or ellipses, nor should he. As much as BlacKkKlansman plays with the mechanics of blaxploitation fantasy, it doesn’t leave one with any question about what’s real. Read full review
89
Paste MagazineWill LeitchAug 7, 2018
This movie is unbalanced and constantly fluctuating and as uneven as you’d expect from Spike Lee, but this time that works for the film rather than against. There’s a nationwide emergency, and Spike Lee, with BlacKkKlansman is screaming in your face for action at every turn. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenAug 9, 2018
BlacKkKlansman is a joke that sticks in your throat, as well as a necessary examination of blight history (those shameful marks on the American record when “white history” and “black history” awfully intersect). Read full review
88
The Associated PressLindsey BahrAug 8, 2018
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years, from composer Terence Blanchard. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy BurrAug 8, 2018
A ferocious mix of prankishness and cold fury that is one of the director’s strongest yet most entertaining works in years. Read full review
88
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldAug 8, 2018
BlacKkKlansman manages that tricky balance of being both entertaining (some of the performances are quite comedic, particularly Paul Walker Hauser as a mouth-breathing Klansman) and devastating. Read full review
88
Washington PostAnn HornadayAug 7, 2018
Accompanied by an expressively lush jazz-blues score by Lee’s regular composer Terence Blanchard, BlacKkKlansman announces from the jump that viewers are in for a lush, sensory treat as Lee plays with the film vernacular he’s manipulated so adroitly and expressively for three decades. Read full review
88
USA TodayBrian TruittAug 7, 2018
Washington (son of Denzel) has an impressive Afro and winning charisma as the first black cop in town. Read full review
88
Movie NationRoger MooreJul 28, 2018
BlackKklansman is the funniest Spike Lee movie in decades, a film of such wit, tension, passion and relevance that it is his most important work since “Malcolm X.” Read full review
85
Film Journal InternationalAndré HerefordAug 7, 2018
The seams definitely show in the film’s effort to contain all the comment, comedy, horror, romance and drama, but Lee handily orchestrates the layout of the period and players. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Aug 9, 2018
BlacKkKlansman, for all its indulgent… Spikiness, is held together by the force of Lee’s messaging. He’s the polemicist as insult comic, wedging truths between each karate chop to the (skin)head of racist America. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyAug 8, 2018
It’s easily the director’s best movie since 2002’s "25th Hour." Read full review
83
UproxxVince ManciniAug 7, 2018
In BlacKkKlansman you sense Lee’s passion more than his technique. In a welcome surprise, it’s also funny. It’s easily Lee’s most crowd-pleasing movie in years, almost to a fault. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 14, 2018
Hell, this thing is so mainstream it feels like the start of a franchise. And yet, that mass appeal is a huge part of what makes this funny and righteously furious American film so powerful. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeAug 26, 2018
BlacKkKlansman slips seamlessly from borderline-absurdist humour to all-too-real horror, conjuring an urgent blend of sociopolitical period satire and contemporary wake-up call. Read full review
80
Total FilmJamie GrahamAug 14, 2018
Furious, relevant, and funny as hell. Read full review
80
EmpireHelen O'HaraAug 13, 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, with a gut-wrenching sting in the tail. Read full review
80
We Got This CoveredLuke ParkerAug 9, 2018
Spike Lee offers no solution here – his story’s conclusion, in the long run, hardly ends on a positive note – but rather a very, very loud plea that cannot be ignored. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternAug 9, 2018
This freewheeling account of an African-American cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1970s is problematic as narrative drama, but stunning as provocation. Read full review
80
SlateInkoo KangAug 9, 2018
BlacKkKlansman may well be the first film to frame the Trump era as one of regression in response to the progress of the Obama years. Read full review
80
The AtlanticDavid SimsAug 8, 2018
This is a film loaded with broad comedy, bold speechifying, blunt depictions of racism, and astonishing visual flair; it is a Spike Lee movie, made with the kind of artistic and political verve that recalls his best work. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinAug 7, 2018
Lee doesn’t do subtlety. But the movie is very entertaining and comes with a stupendous, lushly melodic score by Terence Blanchard. Read full review
80
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottAug 7, 2018
In addition to being the most accessible and purely enjoyable of Lee's film in years, it's also one of his most important. Read full review
80
Time OutPhil de SemlyenMay 24, 2018
Veering from blaxploitation spoof to undercover thriller and ending with a no-punches-pulled real-life coda, it’s riotous fun one minute, savagely biting the next. Read full review
80
CineVueMartyn ConterioMay 15, 2018
That Lee has crafted a funny film full of snazzy editing, stylish imagery and a tremendous blues rock score, yet is laser-focused on a very serious subject matter, demonstrates his mastery of the cinematic medium. Read full review
80
Vanity FairRichard LawsonMay 15, 2018
Lee uses Blaxploitation motifs playfully but with purpose, honoring an era of discourse and activism while urging for the necessity of a similar film language now. If we are not keen to the past, we’re likely to find ourselves mired in its ills again. We already are, of course. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinMay 15, 2018
A heady hybrid of comedy, polemic and period crime drama, it could have been scattergun stuff, and there are patches of preachy overkill. Much more often, though, there’s a rollicking drive and focus to it. Read full review
80
Screen DailyTim GriersonMay 14, 2018
It’s no surprise that director Spike Lee prefers a hammer to a scalpel for this real-life drama, but his righteous fury is supplemented with a mature thoughtfulness that gives the proceedings the grim weight of history. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeMay 14, 2018
Lee’s latest is as much a compelling black empowerment story as it is an electrifying commentary on the problems of African-American representation across more than a century of cinema. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorAug 9, 2018
A bold, if sometimes preachy, film that is stylistically daring, improbably entertaining and politically supercharged. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliAug 8, 2018
BlacKkKlansman comes across as equally entertaining and disturbing, which is most likely what Lee intended. Read full review
75
Philadelphia Daily NewsGary ThompsonAug 8, 2018
The title promises something of a biography, but I left the movie wanting to know more about Stallworth. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineSam C. MacMay 17, 2018
Spike Lee styles the film as a popular entertainment, forgoing the theatrical satire typical of his late-period state-of-the-nation joints, like Bamboozled and Chi-Raq, and settling into the accessible rhythms of the contemporary sitcom. Read full review
75
The Film StageRory O'ConnorMay 16, 2018
A perfectly decent comedy that will be accessible enough for a wide mainstream audience. Read full review
75
The PlaylistJessica KiangMay 16, 2018
BlacKkKlansman has many virtues, but it is also a strange kind of messy, in which the performances from both Washington and Driver are so laid back as to feel curiously low-energy at times. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd May 15, 2018
Although he’s made his most narratively entertaining movie in years, the filmmaker often still privileges polemical discourse over drama, grinding things to a halt for minutes-long speeches—he’s not so different from Godard in that way—and sometimes getting rather on-the-nose with the already exceptionally apparent contemporary echoes. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyMay 14, 2018
Lee and his writers have thrown as many logs on the fire as they’ve been able to find to signal the persistence of racial injustice; they have also endeavored, and mostly succeeded, to entertain. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerAug 10, 2018
If we are being asked to regard BlacKkKlansman as more than a movie, this may be another way of admitting that, on some fundamental level, it falls down as anything but revue sketch agitprop. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerAug 8, 2018
For all its amazing high points (and this satirically minded takedown of the ludicrousness of the American racist right has many of those) BlacKkKlansman also shows Lee at his weakest. The slight running time drags, a sensation not helped by Terence Blanchard's underwhelming score. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 14, 2018
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. Read full review
30
VoxAlissa WilkinsonMay 16, 2018
BlacKkKlansman isn’t wrong about the evils of white supremacy. But it’s pretty sure you, out in the audience, aren’t going to get it unless it spells out the message in blinking neon lights. And even then, the film seems to fear you might miss the point. Read full review
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