Highest 2 Lowest review – Spike Lee and Denzel Washington remake Kurosawa in fine style

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Cannes film festival Akira Kurosawa’s downbeat noir High and Low is retooled with Washington on magnificent form as a record producer whose godson is kidnapped by mistake Spike Lee has made a brash, bold, big-city movie with this pulsing New York adventure that doubles as a love letter to NYC’s sports and its music. It is a remake (or maybe cover version) of Akira Kurosawa’s classic downbeat noir High and Low from 1963, transplanting the action from Yokohama to New York – or rather returning it there, because the original source material, Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom, is set in a fictional city based on the Big Apple. It’s got a terrific throb of energy and life, moving across the screen with the rangy grace of its superstar Denzel Washington – though a little of the minor-key sombreness and complex pessimism and cynicism of the first film has been lost and the modern technology of GPS (unknown in Kurosawa’s day) has indirectly left it with a very small plausibility issue. Cont...
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‘It has become a sort of silver bullet’: why are rap lyrics being put on trial?

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In compelling documentary As We Speak, a controversial legal practice that uses rap lyrics to secure convictions is explored

In September 2001, McKinley Phipps Jr, also known as the rapper Mac, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for manslaughter. It had been a year and a half since gunfire erupted outside a club where he was slated to perform in Slidell, Louisiana, resulting in the death of 19-year-old Barron Victor Jr. Phipps, then 22, maintained his innocence, and the case against him was weak – there was no gun linking him to the crime, several witnesses recanted their testimony and another person confessed to pulling the trigger. And yet, prosecutors had their trump card: Mac, a former New Orleans rap prodigy who began releasing music at the age of 13, had rapped about murder.

“Murder, murder, kill, kill”, Phipps recites in As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial, a new documentary on the criminalization of rap lyrics. Prosecutors spliced that line with one from a different song – “Pull the trigger, put a bullet in your head” – to create the portrait of a killer; Mac’s art was the evidence that DNA, solid confessions, or a missing weapon couldn’t provide. An all-white jury bought it. Phipps served over 21 years in prison before being granted clemency in 2021.

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