Spike Lee 95 Essential Films

While investigating a young nun's rape, a corrupt New York City police detective, with a serious drug and gambling addiction, tries to change his ways and find forgiveness and redemption.

The rape of a bride and the murder of her samurai husband are recalled from the perspectives of a bandit, the bride, the samurai's ghost and a woodcutter.

A crafty ronin comes to a town divided by two criminal gangs and decides to play them against each other to free the town.

In Medieval Japan, an elderly warlord retires, handing over his empire to his three sons. However, he vastly underestimates how the new-found power will corrupt them and cause them to turn on each other...and him.

A bored photographer recovering from a broken leg passes the time by watching his neighbors and begins to suspect one of them of murder.

A former San Francisco police detective juggles wrestling with his personal demons and becoming obsessed with the hauntingly beautiful woman he has been hired to trail, who may be deeply disturbed.

A New York City advertising executive goes on the run after being mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, and falls for a woman whose loyalties he begins to doubt.

Bored waitress Bonnie Parker falls in love with an ex-con named Clyde Barrow and together they start a violent crime spree through the country, stealing cars and robbing banks.

A weak-willed Italian man becomes a fascist flunky who goes abroad to arrange the assassination of his old teacher, now a political dissident.

A young Parisian woman meets a middle-aged American businessman who demands their clandestine relationship be based only on sex.

Frustrated former journalist Chuck Tatum now working for an Albuquerque newspaper exploits a story about trading post owner Leo Minosa trapped in a cave to rekindle Chuck's career, but the story soon escalates into a media circus.

After two male musicians witness a mob hit, they flee the state in an all-female band disguised as women, but further complications set in.

Set in the Watts area of Los Angeles, a slaughterhouse worker must suspend his emotions to continue working at a job he finds repugnant, and then he finds he has little sensitivity for the family he works so hard to support.

A self-proclaimed preacher marries a gullible widow whose young children are reluctant to tell him where their real dad hid the $10,000 he'd stolen in a robbery.

When a childless couple--an ex-con and an ex-cop--decide to help themselves to one of another family's quintuplets, their lives become more complicated than they anticipated.

British POWs are forced to build a railway bridge across the river Kwai for their Japanese captors in occupied Burma, not knowing that the allied forces are planning a daring commando raid through the jungle to destroy it.

The story of T.E. Lawrence, the English officer who successfully united and led the diverse, often warring, Arab tribes during World War I in order to fight the Turks.

An ex-prize fighter turned New Jersey longshoreman struggles to stand up to his corrupt union bosses, including his older brother, as he starts to connect with the grieving sister of one of the syndicate's victims.

Female radio reporter Marcia Jeffries turns folk-singing drifter Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes into a powerful media star who becomes utterly detestable during his meteoric rise.

Set in 1931, Sugar Cane Alley paints a rich impasto of native life under French colonial rules, filtered through the coming-of-age of a bright, sweetly opportunistic boy.

A care-free girl is sold to a traveling entertainer, consequently enduring physical and emotional pain along the way.

A series of stories following a week in the life of a philandering tabloid journalist living in Rome.

A harried movie director retreats into his memories and fantasies.

In the slums of Rio, two kids' paths diverge as one struggles to become a photographer and the other a kingpin.

The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.