Clockers

Director: Spike Lee

1995 / 128min / 35mm

Based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Bronx-born novelist Richard Price, who co-wrote the screenplay with Lee, the harrowing police procedural Clockers starts with the murder of a street-level pusher in the Brooklyn housing projects, then follows the efforts of two world-weary homicide detectives (Harvey Keitel and John Turturro) to untangle the obfuscations around the killing with the help (and hindrance) of locals, including two brothers played by Isaiah Washington and Mekhi Phifer, the latter in his feature debut. “Rough and dark-hued, with an almost tabloid angriness in the scenes of violence… Clockers is not a cool movie; it’s an anguished movie.”—David Denby, New York Magazine