In choosing to adapt Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, Spike Lee set the bar for himself formidably high. That 1963 thriller is one of the Japanese auteur’s finest, a study in stark social contrasts that unfolds in two discrete acts: the first a tense chamber drama set in the hilltop home of a wealthy manufacturer,

Denzel Washington stars in the director’s New York kidnapping drama, inspired by the 1963 classic ‘High and Low.’

Reuniting with his longtime leading man Denzel Washington and remaking an Akira Kurosawa crime classic, Lee captures energy and moral complexity, sometimes wildly.