YMMV / Spike Lee

• Anvilicious: Viewers are rarely left with a lot of questions about what the intended message of a Spike Lee Joint is. For example, Malcolm X ends with Nelson Mandela looking into the camera and telling the audience what to think about Malcolm X. "By any means necessary" (which is a direct quote from X himself) appears in Lee's Vanity Plate 40 Acres And A Mule Filmworks for a reason.
• Audience-Alienating Era: The mid-2000s and much of the 2010s marked a low point in Lee's career. During this time, his fictional films Miracle at St. Anna, Red Hook Summer, the American remake of Oldboy and Da Sweet Blood of Jesus received mixed-to-negative reviews and flopped at the box office. During the same time, Lee became more known for his petty feuds with other directors and random accusations of racism. Fortunately for Lee, he experienced a comeback with BlacKkKlansman in 2018, which was a commercial and critical hit that finally won an Oscar for him.
• Condemned by History: Initially critically acclaimed, with the few critical of Lee considered a vocal minority. Over time, however, Lee's critical approval and overall popularity have declined and many have started to take the opinion that Lee's initial critics were right about the flaws in Lee's writing and storytelling abilities, seeing his characters as lacking dimension and his messaging coming across as being Anvilicious.
• Minority Show Ghetto: Lee has made a name for himself, and intentionally so, as a filmmaker hellbent on telling stories about black America and specifically the systematic, unjust oppression of African-Americans. Not surprisingly, this tends to make his movies somewhat divisive among general (read: predominantly white) audiences. Compare Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing, which were modestly successful but opinions of which remain polarizing to this day, to his most financially successful movie Inside Man, a standard Heist Film which, while it has a black leading actor, features a more racially diverse cast and only briefly touches on racial commentary. The only outlier to this seems to be BlacKkKlansman, as the obvious evil of the Klan is something that even the most Innocently Insensitive white person will agree with.
• Spiritual Successor: American Utopia is one to Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme-directed Concert Film from 36 years prior, taken from Talking Heads' 1983 tour for Speaking in Tongues. Like the Demme film, American Utopia features a minimalist, immersive style that focuses on the performances and just the performances, with minimal cuts to the audience, minimal cuts period, and no interviews or backstage footage (at least not until the end of the movie, and even then it's when the performers are already leaving the venue). The fact that American Utopia focuses on the former frontman of Talking Heads furthers the connection.

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