Clockers

Based on Richard Price's grim best-seller, and directed by Spike Lee from a screenplay co-written with Price, Clockers takes the structure of a police procedural to build a chilling portrait of despair, hope, and the unanswered problem of black-on-black crime in an urban housing project. The film's ...more

Spike Lee's film adaptation of Richard Price's epic novel on the effects of the crack trade has flashes of the director's characteristic brilliance, but, in its lack of focus and overall familiarity, it falls well short of his best work. A project assumed by Lee after the departure of Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro, its relentless deglamorization of the drug trade suggests that the director was attempting his own Goodfellas (1990). But despite Price's highly tuned ear for the bluster, the ...more