Spike And Denzel Show How To Make An Apple Movie Right: 'Highest 2 Lowest'
#332: "Highest 2 Lowest," "On Swift Horses," "Mulholland Drive," "Wind River"
Edition 332:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: A Spike Lee Joint, with Denzel! Then a couple young movie stars prove their mettle, and we talk about the best movies of the 21st Century. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” we’re going back to zombie-land with Ralph Fiennes for more blood and mayhem.
Highest 2 Lowest
It’s never not going to be weird to accept the reality in which one of our greatest living filmmakers, Spike Lee, is putting out a new movie with one of the greatest movie stars of all time, Denzel Washington, that for almost everyone reading this newsletter will not be available in any movie theaters.
It certainly doesn’t help the case for movies being something more than two-hour content vehicles, but in our current challenged Hollywood landscape, it’s hard to blame any parties involved for taking what was almost definitely a hefty bag of cash to kiss the AppleTV+ streaming ring.
The nagging concern with Apple’s movie projects is that they tend to end up looking like a bunch of people playing dress-up, and through the first half-hour of this movie, I was convinced the same fate had befallen Spike—portraying the glamorous side of modern-day New York City inhabited by Denzel’s record executive with penthouses, Rolls Royces and plenty of, ehem, iPhones and AirPods Max.
Without having seen the source material—Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 Japanese film High and Low, considered by many to be one of the greatest police procedurals of all time—you could be deceived into thinking this is a thematic character study. We join Denzel's David King a few years after he’d sold majority control of his record label, on the precipice of selling out of it entirely for a payday.
King, a hitmaker described as having “the best ears in the business,” wants instead to buy back control, getting to the themes Spike has investigated his whole career of black ownership over black art, and the relationship between art and commerce.
It’s not an uninteresting premise, but the heady material puts Denzel into full-on Shakespeare mode. He preens and proselytizes with a swagger that is not entirely believable, over-acting against scene partners that I will generously call inexperienced. It’s closer to Hallmark-style drama.
Then boom. His son gets kidnapped and a ransom-er demands $17.5 million, and we’re off to the races. As much as Spike has excelled in “message movies” over his career, he is a true master of hard genre, and amazingly as the story develops the actual cinematography transforms to be grittier, more kinetic and all in all more, well, cinematic.
The result is a breathless immersion into a crime story that allows for the full Denzel experience—mixing the speechifying with an equally compelling silent charisma and the kind of action movie bonafides of a man fresh off The Equalizer franchise. He’s great, especially in scenes going toe to toe with the extremely capable Jeffrey Wright, and in an climactic showdown with A$AP Rocky (yes, the rapper, who plays one here) that was one of the best scenes I’ve seen all year.
As soon as the plot gets rolling the themes begin falling into place more seamlessly. There are concessions made, of course, to allow Denzel to be something close to a superhero, but the idea of commercial exploitation drowning out artistic expression, especially in a social media world, rings loudly and with resonance.
I’m as surprised as anyone that I’m thinking of this movie among the best of 2025 so far. It’s inconsistent but its highs are mostly unmatched, and I’ll admit, I’m awarding something akin to bonus points for a movie that is set in the real world, modern day, taking on actual situations happening to actual people. Even among the elite filmmakers, few others are doing that. If only we had a chance to see it in theaters!
Something New
On Swift Horses (Netflix): Jacob Elordi is a card-carrying member of what I call the “Schwarzenegger Phylum,” and his performance here as a sexually fluid free spirit in 1950s America only reinforces that opinion. He storms into the lives of newly weds played by rising star Daisy Edgar-Jones and “The Bear” favorite Will Poulter, his character’s older brother, and challenges their traditional American dream before galivanting off on a Las Vegas adventure with a like-minded Diego Calva—a would-be breakout movie star if 2022’s Babylon hadn’t flopped at the box office.
Putting all this exciting 20s and early 30s talent on screen together is a real shot in the arm to an otherwise meandering and reflective adaptation of a novel about the pursuit of different American dreams. Elordi and Edgar-Jones have chemistry Glen Powell in Twisters couldn’t even dream of, and there are enough exciting sequences to make this movie incredibly watchable.
As one more data point in the Next Gen Movie Star Rankings, I think it’s required viewing (although I myself have yet to see Caught Stealing to check in on my horse in the race, Austin Butler).
Something Old
Mulholland Drive (2001, VOD): We’ve gone far too long without mentioning the huge New York Times’ top 100 movies of the 21st Century list, which surveyed more than 500 people in and around the movie business and in my opinion had very strong taste (I had seen 87 of the movies and felt favorably about most of them. The No. 1 movie was Parasite, which is bold but justifiable. The No. 2 movie is one far fewer of my readers have probably seen. There may be some recency bias going on here, since director David Lynch just passed, but his psychological thriller Mulholland Drive is an absolute classic and clearly the best of his movies (in my opinion).
It’s a difficult movie to set up, or even spoil, but this is a noir-ish story about two women searching for clues to a car accident on the titular road, that then swiftly leaves the bounds of hard reality and becomes fantastical in ways that are both confusing and mesmerizing. It’s high art, no doubt, the kind of thing that you can’t understand on one watch but you also can’t deny has a really powerful impact on you. According to the industry, it’s the second best movie of the past 25 years! So you really have to watch it.
Something To Stream
Wind River (Netflix): Before Taylor Sheridan was the Bard of Middle America with his “Yellowstone” universe, he had his hands in some of the best modern Western movies of the 2010s. I was happy to see this one resurface on Netflix and climb into the top five most-watched movies on the platform this week, because this cat-and-mouse thriller starring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen hunting down a killer on an Indian reservation in Wyoming is a seat-gripper from start to finish.
In terms of pure enjoyment and watchability, if you like intense thrillers, this really is about as good as you can do on Netflix (Inside Man and Inglorious Basterds were on there starring at me as I typed that).
Trailer Watch: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
It looks like Sony, which is STARVING for franchises, will stop at no length to turn this zombie world into a winner. That may be a fundamental misunderstanding of what made 28 Years Later one of the very best movies of the year, which was the combination of Alex Garland’s pen and Danny Boyle’s camera. Still, getting Garland to write this one is a good start, and I do think putting this movie out so soon after the first could generate some momentum. Certainly I’m excited to see more of Ralph Fiennes, who absolutely crushed it as the good doctor.