dir. Spike Lee
year. 1989
country. USA
run-time. 129 mins
rating. 15
£6.00 (£4.50 conc.)
Doors: 7.00pm
Film: 7.30pm
October in Britain is Black History Month, and for Deptford Cinema that means a sweeping retrospective of director Spike Lee’s joints. Since his breakout first feature She's Gotta Have It back in 1986, African-American filmmaker Spike Lee has built an incredibly diverse, politically-charged, and hugely respected filmography that is famed for its pull-no-punches focus on the Black American experience in a society still infused with racism, from his early feature Do the Right Thing to the recent Cannes-winning police drama BlackKklansman. Lee’s films hungrily fuse satire, anger, provocative ideological positions, and plenty of humour into compelling expressionistic rockets. Lee’s films dance freely between being realistic and symbolic, lighthearted and tragic, funny and savage, sometimes all within the same scene. Identity, racial prejudice, and the struggles to compromise and co-exist as a minority in the modern world all come under his microscope, even as his 2006 film Inside Man showed him more than capable of switching to more mainstream genre fare. His expressive visual approaches means certain ‘Spike-isms’ are now an immediately recognisable cinematographic flourishes: such as his love of free-floating dolly shots. His longstanding collaboration with Denzel Washington, in films such as Malcolm X and He Got Game, remains one of the most rewarding actor-director collaborations in recent film history. There is so much to be angered by, to be moved by, and to laugh at, in Lee’s filmography that you surely can’t afford to miss out on this retrospective.
DO THE RIGHT THING
On the hottest day of the year on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, everyone's hate and bigotry smolders and builds…. until it explodes into violence. Spike Lee’s early-career writer-director effort about division, love, hate, pizza and racism on the streets of his home city catapulted him to international recognition as a director and earned him two Oscar nods (Best Actor in a Supporting Role -Danny Aiello, Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen- Spike Lee)
Doors Open 7pm*
*Programme Start 7.30pm*
*Age Restriction over 15