Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods
Few other filmmakers have risen to this crisis-ridden moment with the sorely needed compassion and urgency that Spike Lee has shown over the past few weeks. In early May, when New York was still the epicenter of the pandemic that led to the cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival, where he was to have been the first black president of the jury, Lee shot and immediately released New York New York, a three-and-a-half minute Super-8 “love letter” to the city and its people. A little over a week ago, just days after protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd flared up in cities and small towns all across the country, Lee created 3 Brothers, a fierce montage of the deaths of Floyd, Eric Garner, and Do the Right Thing’s Radio Raheem at the hands of police. Starting tomorrow, Netflix will be streaming Lee’s new, 154-minute feature Da 5 Bloods to subscribers around the world. The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday finds the film shot through with “moments of stinging insight and soaring cinematic rhetoric” that “once again prove why Spike Lee might be America’s most indispensable filmmaker.”
Reviewing this “big, brash, and rightly furious sprawl of a movie” for the Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang notes that “Lee reminds us—as he did in his recent, galvanizing BlacKkKlansman—that his notorious powers of provocation are inextricable from his often under-appreciated skills as a storyteller. You could call Da 5 Bloods the victim of bad timing after the COVID-19 pandemic forced Netflix to cancel its planned theatrical release; you could also call it exceptionally well timed, since its political anger feels so urgent that it can scarcely be contained by the parameters of a TV screen.”
