As cinema rereleases go, next week’s 30th-anniversary revival of Do the Right Thing is a well-timed one. The tangible, asphalt-melting heat of Spike Lee’s high summer race-war eruption plays all the more vividly as we head stickily into August. The film is viewable online, though the chance to see just how fiercely it still plays in a cinema shouldn’t be passed up.
Still, in what has been a good year for Spike Lee – who finally won his long-awaited competitive Oscar for BlacKkKlansman in February – this anniversary should prompt your own streaming retrospective of the 62-year-old film-maker’s varied, restless career, which jaggedly runs the gamut from sleek studio entertainments to shot-on-a-shoestring curios to hefty, authoritative documentaries.
Much of it is available in the streaming realm, though the blind spots are sometimes inexplicable: you’ll have to turn to DVD for Jungle Fever, his smart, spiky interracial romance, or 4 Little Girls, his piercing, Oscar-nominated doc on the 16th Street Baptist church bombing. Lee’s nonfiction work is in particularly short supply, in fact. His seminal, seething post-Katrina doc When the Levees Broke can only be streamed in smudgy form on YouTube. His short films are harder still to track down, though the reliable Short of the Week site has his 16-minute doc Mo’Ne Davis: Throw Like a Girl free to stream. It’s a lovely miniature, capturing its subject – a 13-year-old African American girl who happens to be a prodigious Little League baseballer – with unsentimental affection.
Netflix has She’s Gotta Have It served two ways. Lee’s 1986 debut feature, about a young black Brooklyn woman juggling three potential lovers, remains charmingly loose and jazzy. Whatever dated 80s trappings it has are counterbalanced by its fresh, forward-thinking sex positivity. It’s easy to see why Lee recently updated and adapted it into a Netflix TV series of the same name. This is a fun, breezy watch, though even with the luxury of a long-form structure, its world and characterisation don’t feel quite as pointed or textured.
Pay-per-view streaming network Chili has a particularly well-stocked Lee back catalogue. You can head there for major canon titles such as Malcolm X – the rare biopic that can be called truly essential, itching with formal energy atop its comprehensive historical value and Denzel Washington’s muscular, career-crowning performance – and scarcely seen experiments like Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, Lee’s wildly careering but oddly endearing vampire-movie riff.
Chili also have his graceful, elegiac 25th Hour, still one of the few immediate post-9/11 dramas that doesn’t look misjudged today, and three less celebrated Lee joints from the 1990s that all merit a second (or belated first) glance. The hard-boiled, blood-stained Clockers and the earthy, semi-autobiographical Crooklyn, made back to back, work as complementary urban studies of the Brooklyn-reared director’s home turf. His toxic jazzman portrait Mo’ Better Blues, too, holds up more colourfully than reviews at the time predicted.
In addition to Chi-Raq, Lee’s vibrant, jangly street spin on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Amazon Prime has a buried treasure in Pass Over. This adaptation of Antoinette Nwandu’s play was entirely overshadowed last year by BlacKkKlansman (streaming on Now TV), but this Beckett-inspired study of two homeless Chicago men getting through the day is the more affecting, poetic work.
Amazon also has another of Lee’s humid New York evocations, also celebrating a notable anniversary. It’s 20 years since the release of Summer of Sam, his rich patchwork of an Italo-American neighbourhood sweating through serial killer David Berkowitz’s 1976-7 reign of terror. Though it hasn’t cultivated Do the Right Thing’s legacy, it’s one of Lee’s greatest, most humane films, and a reminder that few film-makers capture this sticky season quite like he does.
New to streaming & DVD this week
The Great Hack
(Netflix)
The Cambridge Analytica scandal gets the stern, penetrating documentary treatment it deserves, in a film that methodically traces the ramifications of Facebook data mining – though if it’s suggested for you by Netflix’s algorithm, pause for thought.
Us
(Universal, 15)
Messier than Get Out, but also more formally reckless and invigorating, Jordan Peele’s riotous and petrifying class-conscious horror allegory is the Hollywood film of the year so far.
Happy As Lazzaro
(Modern Films, 12)
Alice Rohrwacher’s dizzy, ingenious modern take on a holy-fool fable blends magical realism and social realism to audacious, sometimes shiver-inducingly beautiful effect.
Capernaum
(Spirit, 15)
Nadine Labaki won a lot of hearts and prizes for this heart-on-sleeve study of a scrappy 12-year-old boy surviving the streets of Beirut, and it’s certainly stirring – though a bit transparently schematic too.
A Blonde in Love
(Second Run, 15)
A sparkling 4K restoration of the late Milos Forman’s Czech New Wave classic, which deftly blends bittersweet social satire with intimate personal portraiture.
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