Clockers

A work of staggering intelligence and emotional force -- a mosaic of broken dreams.Read Full Review »

As always, Lee fills his story with bold, vivid, glib characters who manage to be entertaining even as they flail at one another.Read Full Review »

The film is more than a murder mystery and more than a study in character conflict. At its best, it is an intense and complex portrait of an urban landscape on which the movies' gaze has not often fallen.Read Full Review »

Although Clockers is... a murder mystery, in solving its murder, it doesn't even begin to find a solution to the system that led to the murder. That is the point.Read Full Review »

In Lee's understandable eagerness to let a few rays of hope shine, the polemicist trips up the dramatist--movie conventions replace honest observation. But the passion of this raw, mournful urban epic remains, in spite of the false moves. [25 Sep 1995, p.92]Read Full Review »

Clockers, Lee's eighth feature in nine years, demonstrates how accomplished a filmmaker he has become, securely in control of plot, actors and imagery.Read Full Review »

Ultimately, Clockers probably attempts too much, and ends up seeming overcrowded as a result.Read Full Review »

Beyond its grit and nonchalance, this story has a resigned, reflective, hard-earned wisdom that's unusual in an American film about such familiarly lurid subject matter. It's even more unusual in a film by Spike Lee.Read Full Review »

Lee captures the despair, self-delusion, occasional terror and frequent humor of a praised and popular novel, aided by the potent acting his direction virtually guarantees. [13 Sep 1995, p.01.D]Read Full Review »

The central story itself is not distinctive, and though Lee certainly churns up a lot of dust, he never captures the mythic quality that made Price's original seem so much bigger than its almost generic cast of players.Read Full Review »