At first glance, Crooklyn appears less focused than Spike Lee’s previous films — it seemingly meanders without much overarching plot for its first two thirds, then crams a surprising amount of drama into the final act. The performances rule, but the pacing feels off, and scenes transpire without much regard for what precedes or follows them.

The film makes much more sense when you contextualize its connection to its creators. With a story written by Spike’s sister Joie and a protagonist whose name, appearance, and situation resembles her own, Crooklyn comes into focus as the Lee siblings’ ode to their own childhood (the script was cowritten by Joie, Spike, and Cinqué Lee, their brother).

The film’s fixation on ultra-specific details and…

Woody Carmichael (Delroy Lindo) and his wife Carolyn (Alfre Woodard) have a lot on their plate in 1973 era Brooklyn. Troy (Zelda Harris) watches her father and mother struggle and deals with her four rowdy brothers as best as she can.

This is an outstanding and highly personal comedy/drama from Spike Lee. He had just come off of the huge production of Malcolm X and wanted to work on a smaller scale for a break. His sister Joie showed him a screenplay she wrote about their childhood and he instantly decided that would be his next film.

I absolutely adored the opening sequence with the various children playing long forgotten street games. It goes beyond just nostalgia and becomes something…

"Ladybug, you turned out pretty good considering you were raised in a house full of ashy, rusty-butt boys."

What could have very easily been navel gazy or schmaltzy is handled with such grace and charm, a loving tribute to a sister and a mother (with only a few scenes centered on the clear Spike analog, mostly shown with his fishtank glasses pointed at a Knicks game on TV). CROOKLYN is rich with details and set to a soundtrack that would seem obvious were it not so appropriate (Terrence Blanchard's score reminded me of how underappreciated he is as a composer).

I saw this movie for the first time (at a drive-in, weirdly) with my own family, so it carries a…

A colorful and musical recreation of Spike Lee and his siblings own childhood living on a sweaty, noisy Brooklyn block with incredibly moving and lived-in performances by Zelda Harris as his little sister, Alfre Woodward as their fiery, finically responsible school teacher mother and Delroy Lindo as the cool jazz piano playing father. The narrative structure of drifting real-life incident clearly based on memory rather than any sort of conventional movie drama is well-served by Lee's choice to assemble this around wall-to-wall authentic period texture/needle drops/TV programming and moments so weirdly hyper-specific (RuPaul dancing, the couch dog, the glue sniffer dream) they can only have actually happened. There's so much intimate and rich detail to how a real family fights…