Every Spike Lee Movie, Ranked
Updated 9/11/20 to add American Utopia.
Spike Lee's new Netflix film Da 5 Bloods has been earning mostly terrific reviews, but where does it rank among the veteran director's best films? In the gallery above, we rank every feature directed by Lee in order by Metascore (reflecting the consensus of top professional film critics) from worst to best.
Note that a few made-for-television films are not included because there were not enough reviews available to calculate a Metascore. These include Spike Lee & Company: Do It a Cappella (1990), Sucker Free City (2004), Kobe Doin' Work (2009), and 2 Fists Up (2016).
Lee’s second Michael Jackson documentary (Bad 25 appears later on this list) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016. It’s an uncritical look at a working artist in transition. A track-by-track breakdown of Off the Wall is the film’s highlight, but Lee’s failure to delve deeper into Jackson’s demons irked some critics.
“It’s a brazen celebration of Jackson, which unlike Lee’s other documentary work doesn’t look under the hood to tell the whole story and examine some of the more uncomfortable inner workings.” —Lanre Bakare, The Guardian
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