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,

I’m going to hear it from him if I’m not bringing it,” Lee tells Vanity Fair. “I don’t want my brother to get my ass slapped. Can’t do that. There’s a standard we have.”