Movie Review | Highest 2 Lowest

Highest 2 Lowest (Photo – A24 & Apple Films)

Spike Lee’s new movie, Highest 2 Lowest, is an overstuffed film that feels longer than its 130-minute runtime.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Highest 2 Lowest
Directed by Spike Lee – 2025
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan

Lee’s film opens with a cloudless sky and a New York skyline whose buildings look pristine, as if shaped by more enlightened hands than those of greedy developers. Soon, though, the film becomes dense with detail, something like a Jackson Pollock canvas that refuses to let the eye rest.

We then swoop down to the penthouse of hip-hop mogul David King, played by Denzel Washington, who lives among expensive furniture, framed headshots of Black luminaries, and even a canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat. King, a once-hip producer whose hit-making days are behind him, is making a last-ditch effort to avoid being bought out by corporate interests who, in his words, “will squeeze out every drop of Black integrity.”

Then he gets the news that his son has been kidnapped.

This development opens the movie up to New York itself, which may be half the reason for the film’s existence. High to low, indeed. Over the course of the film’s 24-hour timeframe, we move from corporate offices to a basketball gym (where former Laker Rick Fox, as coach, makes latecomers run suicides), to a subway rumbling through a Puerto Rican neighborhood alive with salsa music and a brief appearance by Rosie Perez, and finally to a dark downtown lair where King confronts the kidnapper. A subsequent subway chase nods to The French Connection.

(Lee being Lee, there are plenty of references to the Yankees and Knicks, though the hard-luck Giants don’t get a mention.)

The soundtrack sometimes muscles in on the action, but I found the jazzy, orchestral score a lively change from the digestive drones of synthesizers I’ve heard too much of lately. The movie is like that: sprawling, messy, maybe like New York itself.

Denzel Washington, on sturdier turf than in Gladiator 2, gives a solid performance as David King. No, he may not be the actor he was in Malcolm X or The Hurricane, at times it feels like he’s squeezing out emotions rather than simply embodying them, but there’s still enough there, especially with support from Jeffrey Wright, to carry the film.

The movie has its rough edges, but there’s a compelling energy that keeps it moving.

For me, an almost-lifelong Angeleno who’s seen many a movie and read many a book about New York, the latest being Garth Risk Hallberg’s massive City on Fire, Lee’s film was a treat for this armchair traveler.

> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, LOOK Dine-In Cinemas Glendale, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Downtown Los Angeles and Regal LA Live.