While the director’s overtly political satires have never fared especially well at the box office, the combination of ripped-from-the-headlines urgency and slick, provocative packaging should draw more than a handful of Lee fans and curious moviegoers - led by but not limited to black audiences - as “Chi-Raq” makes its way from theaters to Amazon’s streaming service. Blunt, didactic and stronger on conceptual audacity than dramatic coherence, this is still the most vital, lived-in work in some time from a filmmaker who has never shied away from speaking his mind or irritating his ideological foes, as he seems destined to do again with this attention-grabbing first feature to be released by Amazon Studios (co-distributing Dec. All that social outrage clearly demanded similarly outsized treatment, and Lee and co-writer Kevin Willmott (“CSA: The Confederate States of America”) have found a remarkably accommodating vessel in Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” whose tale of an ancient Greek heroine leading an anti-war sex strike has been updated here as an alternately soulful and scalding, playful and deadly serious 21st-century oratorio. ![]() It may not take much to make Spike Lee angry, but there’s no denying he gives us his reasons and then some in “ Chi-Raq,” a sprawling, blistering state-of-the-union address that presents Chicago’s South Side as a cesspool of black-on-black violence, gang warfare, gun worship and macho misogyny, ruled by unbreakable cycles of poverty and oppression.
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