BlacKkKlansman
classified 15Please note: This was screened in Sept 2018
Spike Lee makes a triumphant return to form with this furious and often funny true-life tale of a black cop who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan.
John David Washington (the son of Lee regular Denzel Washington) stars as Ron Stallworth, the real-life black detective who went undercover in the late 70s in the Ku Klux Klan. Though he communicates with members on the phone (even managing to dupe the Grand Wizard, David Duke, played by a skin-crawlingly good Topher Grace), he sends his white, Jewish partner (Adam Driver) to 'stand in' for him at meetings and rallies.
Lee clearly sees in Stallworth's story a way to take a temperature read on Trump's America, tracing the lineage of the Black Power movement and the white supremacist hate groups of the 70s to their present-day counterparts: Black Lives Matter and the alt-right. Lee has made a film that is impossible to ignore - and we're sure he wouldn't want it any other way.