Every Spike Lee Film Ranked From Worst to Best

Spike Lee has spent four decades making movies that can be furious, funny, messy, stylish and occasionally all four within the same scene. With 2025’s Highest 2 Lowest extending his feature-film career into another decade, now’s a good time to rank his narrative features and see which ones still demand your attention.

The Roughest Cuts Still Have Some Spike in Them

For sanity’s sake, we’re ranking Lee’s narrative feature films rather than documentaries, concert films and shorts. That still gives you a career stretching from She’s Gotta Have It in 1986 to Highest 2 Lowest in 2025.

24. Oldboy (2013) Lee remaking Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy always sounded like a strange proposition, and the finished movie never finds a convincing reason to exist. Josh Brolin commits, but the brutality feels secondhand rather than dangerous.

23. She Hate Me (2004) A corporate whistleblower, lesbian couples paying for pregnancies and Wall Street satire all compete for space. Lee’s ambition isn’t the problem. The movie simply can’t make those pieces behave.

22. Miracle at St. Anna (2008) Lee’s World War II epic has scale and worthy ideas about Black soldiers fighting for a country that discriminated against them. At roughly 160 minutes, though, it’s dramatically uneven.

21. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014) This Kickstarter-funded remake of Ganja & Hess is stranger than its reputation suggests. But its ideas about addiction, desire and blood rarely connect into a satisfying whole.

20. Red Hook Summer (2012) A teenager spends a summer with his preacher grandfather in Brooklyn, giving Lee room to revisit community, religion and neighborhood change. The late tonal shift is difficult to shake.

19. Girl 6 (1996) Theresa Randle plays an aspiring actor who becomes a phone-sex operator, while Prince supplies much of the soundtrack. Uneven, yes, but far more playful than its middling reputation suggests.

The Middle Is Where Things Get Weird

18. Highest 2 Lowest (2025) Lee’s reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 High and Low reunites him with Denzel Washington for their fifth feature together. It earned a 74 Metascore, but its mixture of crime thriller, music-business satire and New York celebration won’t work equally well for everyone.

17. Mo’ Better Blues (1990) Washington’s jazz trumpeter Bleek Gilliam is talented enough to make selfishness look seductive. The music and photography carry stretches where the relationships don’t.

16. School Daze (1988) Lee’s second feature tackles class, colorism and campus politics at a fictional historically Black college. It’s unruly by design, sometimes exhausting, and packed with ideas he’d sharpen later.

15. Summer of Sam (1999) The Son of Sam murders become the backdrop for a sweaty portrait of paranoia in 1977 New York. Adrien Brody’s punk outsider is especially memorable.

14. Get on the Bus (1996) A group of Black men travels across America toward the Million Man March. Most of the drama comes from conversation, disagreement and forced proximity, which gives the movie an appealingly direct pulse.

13. Chi-Raq (2015) An adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata about gun violence in Chicago, performed partly in verse, could've collapsed immediately. Instead, its audacity keeps pulling you along, even when individual choices miss.

12. Bamboozled (2000) A TV writer creates an intentionally racist minstrel show and watches America embrace it. Subtlety isn't the goal. Twenty-plus years later, its anger at entertainment turning exploitation into content feels painfully recognizable.

This Is Where Lee Starts Cooking

11. Crooklyn (1994) One of Lee’s warmest films follows a Brooklyn family through childhood, money problems and loss. Zelda Harris gives it a perspective that feels lived-in rather than nostalgic.

10. Jungle Fever (1991) Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra play coworkers whose affair detonates across racial and family lines. Samuel L. Jackson nearly steals the film as Snipes’ addicted brother, Gator.

9. He Got Game (1998) Washington plays a prisoner temporarily released to persuade his basketball-prodigy son, played by real NBA star Ray Allen, to attend the governor’s preferred college. Basketball movies rarely understand the business surrounding young talent this well.

8. Clockers (1995) A murder investigation opens into a bleak study of policing, drugs and limited choices. Delroy Lindo is terrifying without needing to raise the temperature much.

7. Inside Man (2006) Lee doing a studio bank-heist thriller turns out to be ridiculously enjoyable. Washington, Clive Owen and Jodie Foster get a sharp script, while Lee sneaks questions about wealth and power through the genre machinery.

6. Da 5 Bloods (2020) Four Black Vietnam veterans return decades later to recover their squad leader’s remains and buried gold. Delroy Lindo’s performance gives the movie its bruised, furious center.

Five Films That Explain Why Spike Lee Matters

5. She’s Gotta Have It (1986) Made before “Spike Lee movie” meant anything, his debut already has the confidence, direct address and sexual frankness that would define his voice.

4. 25th Hour (2002) Edward Norton plays a convicted drug dealer spending his final day free before prison. Released in 2002, it also became one of the earliest major films to absorb the grief and altered atmosphere of post-9/11 New York.

3. BlacKkKlansman (2018) John David Washington and Adam Driver infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in a story based on Ron Stallworth’s experiences. Lee won his first competitive directing/writing Oscar when the film took Best Adapted Screenplay.

2. Malcolm X (1992) Washington gives one of his defining performances across a 202-minute epic that refuses to reduce Malcolm X to a slogan. Lee makes room for transformation, contradiction, faith and political evolution.

1. Do the Right Thing (1989) Nothing else gets the top spot. On one brutally hot day in Brooklyn, neighborhood arguments build toward violence, and Lee refuses to hand you an easy moral exit. More than 35 years later, the film still feels immediate because everyone in it believes they’re making sense.

Why You Should Care

You don’t need to become a Spike Lee completist. But watching even five or six of these movies shows how one director can keep returning to race, money, masculinity, New York and American hypocrisy without making the same film twice.

And when Lee misses, he usually misses while attempting something specific. That makes even the failures more interesting than anonymous competence.

What to Watch Next

Start with Do the Right Thing if you’ve never seen Lee at his best, then jump to Inside Man for his most accessible thriller and Malcolm X for the full-scale Denzel Washington collaboration. After those three, you won’t need another ranking to tell you whether you want more.