Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest
By David Hudson
The Daily—
May 21, 2025
Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (2025)
Taking a quick break from playing Othello on Broadway, Denzel Washington flew to Cannes for the Monday night premiere of Highest 2 Lowest, the fifth feature he’s made with Spike Lee. Before rolling the film, Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux surprised Washington with an honorary Palme d’Or—presented by Lee. “This is my brother, right here,” said Lee, who was decked out in an orange and blue zoot suit custom-designed by Cointel as a tribute to both Lee’s beloved Knicks and Shorty, the sidekick he played alongside Washington in Malcolm X (1992).
In the nearly forty years since his debut, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Lee has “given us era-defining statements and eccentric sidebars, epic biopics and intimate performance movies, blockbusters and docs, highs and lows,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Fear. “You never know which Spike you’re going to get—the crank, the cinephile, the cut-up, the muckraker, the mess maker, the master craftsman, the man with so much trouble on his mind—once the lights go down. Best case scenario, you get all of them, each one duking it out for stage time. Highest 2 Lowest gives the majority of those Spikes a chance to step into the ring.”
In what Lee has been calling a “reinterpretation” of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), Washington is David King, a music mogul widely regarded as the man with “the best ears in the business.” His record company, Stackin’ Hits, has scored fifty Grammys, but it’s been a while since the last win. “In Washington’s playful, stirring, and emotionally complex performance, one of his best in recent memory, we feel King’s acute yearning to reconnect with the music that years of titanic success have distanced him from,” writes the New Yorker’s Justin Chang.
“Highest 2 Lowest is an old man’s movie, and I don’t mean that as a criticism,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore. At Little White Lies, Mark Asch senses that Lee is “as hungry as King is to prove that he’s still got it. He puts himself in the company of the best of Black American culture with references to James Brown and Aretha Franklin, Sula by Toni Morrison, and Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia by Obama presidential portrait artist Kehinde Wiley, while filling out the cast with young stars like Ice Spice and Princess Nokia.”
David King is looking to get his groove back, first by retaking a controlling stake in his company. The money he’ll need to raise is going to put a severe squeeze on his family’s finances, but his wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), while skeptical, is also fully supportive. It’s a cruelly inopportune time, then, to receive a call from a mysterious kidnapper who claims to have his son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), and demands a ransom of $17.5 million in Swiss francs.
But hold the phone. The kidnapper doesn’t have Trey after all. Instead, he’s got Trey’s best friend, Kyle (Elijah Wright), the son of Paul (Jeffrey Wright), King’s chauffeur and lifelong buddy. The price remains the same: $17.5 million. Will David King pay?
Highest 2 Lowest is “a new entry on the scroll of great New York films,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek. “It’s smart, hugely entertaining, and profound in a way that’s anything but sentimental . . . Every choice Lee has made pays off handsomely, and the movie’s action centerpiece—involving a subway chase, a Puerto Rican Day celebration featuring salsa great Eddie Palmieri, and a motorcycle relay of exquisite precision—might be the most beautifully edited sequence you’ll see all year. (Lee’s editors here are Barry Alexander Brown and Allyson C. Johnson.)”
The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney finds that cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s “work here is next-level; it’s a great-looking movie with a sumptuous visual sheen that looks the way good cashmere feels. Lee shakes up the compositions with playful flourishes like wipes using the logo of David’s record company, split screen with a row of guns as the dividing line, and a stylized insert conceived like a music video and performed by a singer behind bars in an orange jumpsuit, magically flanked by twerking backup dancers.”
Over the years, Lee’s films “have grown more assured in their strangeness,” writes Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. “Highest 2 Lowest is peak Lee, a determinedly New York film about money, influence, and generational divides in the business of making art. It’s half mess, half triumph, and thrilling even in its failures.”
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