Mo' Better Blues

It’s tight, suspenseful, funny and packed with great music. Read full review

The music becomes an aspect of Washington's performance - as does, in a satisfying way, everything else in the film. [03 Aug 1990, p.7]

Mo' Better Blues is not a great film, but it's an interesting one, which is almost as rare. Read full review

Full of wonderful music, grand visuals, and melodramatic plot twists, the movie is laced with very funny moments, as well as interesting insights into the world of jazz and the plight of the dedicated musician. Read full review

A messy but nonetheless compelling movie. Read full review

Spike Lee is too passionate and distinctive a film maker to make a lousy movie. So although Mo' Better Blues, his latest, is a misfire, there is a personality behind every camera shot. An audience is willing to go farther down the road with Lee than with another film maker, and even when, as in this case, the road leads nowhere, it's hard to resent the trip. [03 Aug 1990, p.E1]

This time, Lee fails to do the right thing, but he may have come up with a cult film. And compared to too much of this summer's sludge, that's almost mo' better enough. [03 Aug 1990]

Mo’ Better Blues repeatedly draws back from its characters, exchanging intimacy for shtick and, in the end, lapsing into half-baked psychodrama. Read full review

I wish Mo' Better Blues were a little mo' better than it is, but Spike Lee remains a major filmmaking talent, and even his second-best work has an awful lot going for it. Read full review

Few will accuse Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues of being a masterpiece. But it's still full of the things that make Spike Lee films, well, Spike Lee films. Full of the fun, full of the spirit. Read full review

Lee is better at topical parody than he is at intimate character drama, at least so far. Another is that movies about jazz are never very good, and Spike Lee, talented as he is, couldn't do much to change that. [03 Aug 1990, p. G5]

While Mo' Better Blues is quite tolerable entertainment, it's skin-deep stuff, and not much of a stretch for the actors. [03 Aug 1990, p.3]

Sometimes brilliantly original, at other times dull and formulaic, Mo' Better Blues is well worth seeing - for jazz and Spike Lee fans, it's a must-see - but it often fails to engage us on a deep emotional level. [03 Aug 1990, p.3F]

Once the riffs are over and put into place, Mo' Better Blues is approximately one-third fabulous, one-third boring, and one-third infuriating. [06 Aug 1990]

Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues about a talented jazz trumpet player willing to sacrifice every relationship to his music, is by turns seductive, engaging and, finally, maddening. Read full review

Personal rather than social issues come to the fore in Mo' Better Blues, a Spike Lee personality piece dressed in jazz trappings that puffs itself up like Bird but doesn't really fly. More focused on the sexual dilemmas of its main character than on musical themes, pic might well be subtitled He's Gotta Have It. Read full review

Mo' Better Blues is not only about artistry unfulfilled. It is artistry unfulfilled. It is perfection without a meaningful plot. It lopes along, pleasantly, never reaching fruition. [03 Aug 1990, p.18]

Though it's full of striking visual ideas and actorly turns, it never fully convinces. Read full review

A jazz piece may be improvised, sketched out in the process of creation, but a movie resists that kind of spontaneity -- or requires skills that are beyond Lee's talents at the moment. Read full review

From characters to camera angles, this story of a self-absorbed jazz trumpeter is one long cliche, the kind that might make his most loyal admirers wince and wonder, Spike, what happened? Read full review

A film that could have been the first cleareyed view of the jazz world from a black perspective ends as a romanticized fable. For the only time in his remarkable career, Spike Lee has failed to tell it like it is. Read full review

Mo' Better Blues has problems. Lee hates being compared with Woody Allen, but it looks as if he's going to do what Allen did in trying a new kind of film until it works. [03 Aug 1990, p.29p]

A messy, meandering script ensures that, despite stylish camerawork and sturdy acting, this lengthy indulgence succeeds neither as jazz movie nor as cautionary tale. Read full review