Is the New Spike Lee Joint Serving Pound Cake?

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The New York Times

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Arts

4.8 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Highest 2 Lowest” is an over-the-top, bougie and unapologetically New York movie. It might also be Spike Lee’s most conservative offering to date. Wesley invites critic Vinson Cunningham to discuss whether the 68-year-old director is picking up an old refrain, and telling young Black men to pull up their pants.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Wesley Morris, and this is Cannonball.
0:13.1	Today, we're going from the highest to the lowest.
0:36.0	I never think of Spike Lee as a summer movie filmmaker, but I'm also an idiot because I'm sitting here, and it's occurring to me that this is actually a summer movie man.
0:38.8	It's been true more or less for 40 years.
0:41.1	A lot of his movies have come out in the summer.
0:41.9	I know.
0:42.8	I was there.
0:43.8	I saw them.
0:46.4	His masterpiece obviously do the right thing,
0:50.2	but also Mo Better Blues and Jungle Fever.
0:53.8	One of my favorite Spikely movies is called Summer of Sam,
0:56.1	and it actually came out in the summer of 1999. Also, Black Klansman? Summer movie! And now we've got highest, lowest, that's highest,
1:05.6	too lowest. It hit theaters last weekend. It'll start streaming on Apple TV Plus, September 5th.
1:12.5	And I don't know, this movie, it feels like right now to me
1:16.7	in some very strange and interesting ways.
1:19.5	I have to warn you, there's no way to talk about how right now it actually is
1:23.0	without laying out the whole plot.
1:24.9	So that is what I'm going to do.
1:27.0	The movie, loosely a remake of an
1:29.0	Akira Kora Sauer film from 1963 called High and Low. It's a suspense classic. It is just
1:35.8	really good filmmaking. And that movie was based on an Ed McBain novel called King's Ransom.
1:42.1	This one, Spike Lee's movie, highest, the lowest, it reunites Spike with Denzel Washington,
	...

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