Muddled Remake: Denzel Washington Can’t Salvage Spike Lee’s Surprisingly Scattered ‘Highest 2 Lowest’

Why Black Art Is the Real Main Character in 'Highest 2 Lowest'

Pieces by artists like Deborah Roberts and Basquiat are more than a backdrop in Spike Lee’s newest Denzel Washington-led drama.

Spike Lee's New Crime Thriller With Denzel Washington Is Dominating Apple TV+

Highest 2 Lowest, Spike Lee's modern-day reimagining of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low, has quickly shot to the top of the Apple TV+ charts.

Muddled remake: Denzel Washington can’t salvage Spike Lee’s surprisingly scattered ‘Highest 2 Lowest’

Denzel Washington and director Spike Lee have had a great partnership through the years—including Malcolm X, still one of the greatest biopics ever made. Sadly, their fifth pairing proves to be their weakest. While New York City has never looked more beautiful than it does in Highest 2 Lowest, stunningly shot by cinematographer Matthew Libatique, the film never finds a rhythm. Despite a good performance by Washington, and some of the standard st…

Spike Lee’s ‘Highest 2 Lowest’ is primo old head cinema

The term “late style” can be a bit of an amorphous catch-all term in art criticism, a concept that can stretch or shrink to fit any discussion of an artist in the later years of a storied career. It’s even harder to unpack within a specific film context, but the newest release from Spike Lee, his first collaboration with Denzel Washington in twenty years, screams “late style.” Lacking the space to expand upon that, we might, for the sake of expe…