She's Gotta Have It

Spike Lee's breakthrough independent feature, shot in fifteen days on a budget of $175,000, ushered in (along with Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise) the American independent film movement of the 1980s. It was also a groundbreaking film for African-American filmmakers and a welcome change in the ...more

An excellent debut by any standard, Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It was part of the American independent film boom in the mid-'80s. Made on a low budget and premiered at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival,, the film is a freshly entertaining, witty romantic comedy set in a lived-in Brooklyn neighborhood featuring a cast of unknown, young black actors. Admittedly, though she has a striking physical presence, Tracy Camila Johns doesn't entirely convince as the sexually adventurous Nola Darling, and the ...more