Highest 2 Lowest: the best movie to bypass Australian cinemas in 2025

Ask Spike Lee to survey his hometown and New York is indeed his oyster. Only Martin Scorsese brings the Big Apple to cinematic life as vividly, as probingly yet lovingly, and with as much energy as the Do the Right Thing, Clockers and 25th Hour filmmaker.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the action centrepiece of Highest 2 Lowest, Lee’s 2025 joint, pulsates with NYC flourishes: the subway, the Puerto Rican Day Parade, zipping feverishly through crowded streets, Yankees fans lambasting Boston.

That the film’s spectacular midpoint is just that – propulsive and thrilling, too, as agilely shot by cinematographer Matthew Libatique and edited by Barry Alexander Brown and Allyson C Johnson – should also evoke zero astonishment. It’s one of the year’s greatest action sequences.

Lee loves splashing his passions across the screen with force and feeling; throw in his now five-time star Denzel Washington, plus honouring Japanese icon Akira Kurosawa, whose 1963 masterpiece High and Low he reimagines, and this Highest 2 Lowest high point overflows enthusiastically and astutely with its helmer’s obsessions.

Highest 2 Lowest: a Spike Lee remake

It takes an hour for Washington to ride the rails on a ransom drop in what instantly sits among cinema’s best New York-set chases, alongside The French Connection. Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game and Inside Man lead is David King, founder  of Stackin’ Hits Records and owner of ‘the best ears in the business’, who didn’t envisage a day earlier that he’d be swapping talking business at his penthouse overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge for giving a kidnapper $17.5 million in Swiss francs.

High and Low viewers know his predicament: as he’s amassing funds to rescue his company from a consortium that favours profit over artistry, an abductor demands a fortune to return King’s teenage son Trey (Aubrey Joseph). Panic-stricken with his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), he’ll trade every cent that he has for his boy’s return, even if it means sacrificing his professional dreams.

Would he make the same call for his chauffeur’s child? So ponders the narrative’s weighty early moral quandary. When it emerges that Kyle (Elijah Wright), son of King’s righthand man Paul (Jeffrey Wright), has been snatched up instead, relinquishing his life’s work and paying up isn’t immediately a given.

That Lee has moulded the movie with his trademarks, including interrogating race relations and class clashes, plus deploying dolly shots and camera angles gazing high and low, isn’t a shock. That the project didn’t originate with him, with Washington forwarding on Alan Fox’s script, is, however.

The question of how to do the right thing is a decades-old recurring theme in Lee’s work, terrain that he keeps finding new ways to examine. Ed McBain’s 1959 novel King’s Ransom, which both High and Low and Highest 2 Lowest adapt, is set in a fictional locale based on NYC.

Lee also began his career paying tribute to Kurosawa, with Rashomon an influence on his 1986 full-length directorial debut She’s Gotta Have It.

Highest 2 Lowest: a straight-to-streaming stunner

For an auteur whose pictures, sublime David Byrne concert documentary American Utopia among them, can’t be mistaken for another director’s, Lee has been eagerly retracing his peers’ footsteps of late. Half of his last six narrative features are remakes or reinterpretations, starting with 2013’s take on Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy and also spanning 2014’s Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, a spin on 1973 horror Ganja & Hess.

Musing on success, authenticity, creativity and commerce, Highest 2 Lowest poses an explanation for Lee’s recent penchant for gleaning inspiration from others. After decades immersed in the reality of the music business, King is yearning to return to the days when discovering talent was his spark. In nodding to favourite films and directors, Lee similarly reclaims a key source of stimulus.

Oldboy, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus and Highest 2 Lowest share something else in Australia, all skipping cinemas. In the latter’s case, an Apple TV release, audiences have missed catching one of the best films of 2025 on the silver screen.

If Highest 2 Lowest wasn’t already screaming ‘see this as big as possible’ before its stunning train sequence, via a sumptuously shot first act that commences with the exuberance of ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ and the shine of the Brooklyn skyline, it hollers that sentiment from then onwards.

Two electric showdowns between Washington and A$AP Rocky, who plays aspiring rapper Yung Felon; a gravitas-dripping Washington relishing cycling between slinging lyrics battle-style, thoughtful contemplation and flirting with his action-hero guise; Lee and Fox daring to push their source material in a confident 21st-century direction; a deepening scrutiny of making it, faking it, striving for it, envying it and appreciating it: they all follow in the wild ride of a second half.

Highest 2 Lowest: two icons reflect

While their place among the finest actor-director combinations, including High and Low’s Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, has long been assured, almost two decades have passed since Washington and Lee last collaborated. Highest 2 Lowest plays like a culmination for its star and helmer. Both are in celebratory yet reflective mode.

Dreaming of hitting it big, certain of their talent to get there and willing to make a splash to do so, they’ve been the Yung Felons of American cinema, together and separately. Now, they’re patently aware that doing what they love is what matters – whether Lee is finally winning an Oscar for BlacKkKlansman or Washington is having a ball in Gladiator II.

King rages against today’s trends, such as AI and the social media-amplified attention economy, but Lee and Washington aren’t seasoned hands rankled by the generations that’ve followed them; rather, they’re veterans with the concept of legacy firmly on their minds.

They’re not the first to bring High and Low to New York, thanks to Steven Soderbergh’s 2023 TV drama Full Circle. Also courtesy of that gripping series, Lee isn’t the first to pair it with spherical motifs, layering in the cyclical nature of life and history visually.

The acclaimed filmmaker has added to 2025’s spate of genre-hopping movies reckoning with the impossibility of getting ahead in a polarised modern America, too, in a year that’s also delivered Eddington, Weapons, One Battle After Another and The Running Man.

Get Lee and Washington throwing everything they have into an exploration of what it truly takes to make a mark, the cost and challenges, and the battle for genuine fulfilment along the way, though, and the result is all highs and no lows.

Highest 2 Lowest is currently streaming on Apple TV.

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