The best Spike Lee movies, ranked

When the Levee Breaks, the story of Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath, proved that Spike Lee can be as sharp a documentarian as he is a fiction filmmaker. At times, When the Levee Breaks is among the angriest films in Lee’s entire filmography. What makes the entire four-part series so moving is that it also documents the resilience that has allowed New Orleans to rise from the ashes of that disaster and become the vital, music-filled community that it was in the days before it was devastated.

Proof that Lee has still got plenty left in the tank, BlacKkKlansman tells the fascinating true story of a sheriff’s deputy who goes undercover with the KKK after he is mistaken on the phone for a white man. Thanks to a star-making performance from John David Washington as well as reliably excellent work from Adam Driver, BlacKkKlansman managed to speak urgently to the Trump presidency even though the film is set in the 1970s. It’s one of Lee’s more overtly political and of-the-moment movies, and few directors could pull it off the way that he manages to.

Easily one of the most controversial movies of Lee’s career, Bamboozled is a send-up of network television in an era when it was dominant. Although its satire may have seemed far-fetched to viewers in 2000, Bamboozled has only seemed more and more prescient as the years have gone by. The minstrel show at the film’s center, and the eagerness with which the network takes advantage of it to its own ends, feel almost startlingly relevant more than 20 years later. Few films in Lee’s film have held up better, even in spite of a mixed critical reception upon its release.

Spike Lee has never been afraid to reference contemporary issues or real-world politics in his filmmaking, but one of his best directorial efforts strips all of that away. Inside Man is, fundamentally, a heist movie that tells the story of a group of bank robbers and the cops who have to deal with him. Featuring a brilliant lead performances from Denzel Washington and the kind of technical proficiency that few directors ever put on display, Inside Man is a thriller with genuinely great twists and turns. On top of all that, it’s also a great New York movie, as so many of Lee’s movies are.