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Home > Celestial Blood > Weekend film reviews: ‘Highest 2 Lowest,’ ‘Nobody 2,’ ‘The Knife’
Podcast: Celestial Blood
Episode:

Weekend film reviews: ‘Highest 2 Lowest,’ ‘Nobody 2,’ ‘The Knife’
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-08-14 19:00:00
Description: The latest film releases include Highest 2 Lowest, Nobody 2, The Knife, and Went Up the Hill. Weighing in are Christy Lemire, film critic for RogerEbert.com and co-host of the YouTube channel Breakfast All Day, and Shawn Edwards, film critic for FOX4 News in Kansas City and co-founder of the African American Film Critics Association. Highest 2 Lowest Denzel Washington and director Spike Lee work together for the fifth time in this remake of an Akira Kurosawa-directed movie called High and Low. The original is a police procedural and morality tale. Edwards: “[Washington and Lee] demonstrate the cinematic rhythm that they've developed over three decades. … It has a rhythm much like a jazz song. I mean, the editing, the dialogue, the cinematography, and the art direction are all intentionally cool, and they resonate with this swagger. But the story is intense and the stakes are high. Now this movie works because Spike Lee has always been an urgent filmmaker, even when he's reinterpreting material like this film. … Denzel Washington plays this music mogul. … Everything isn't as golden or platinum as perceived, because he's in a situation where he's got to reconfigure this record label. He's has to make some business moves in order to take back control of the label, or else he's out of the game. … Time and the industry and new taste and culture are beginning to pass him by. And while he's going through all of this, his son, or it seems, is kidnapped. But his son isn't kidnapped. It's his best friend who actually works for him, as his driver, played by Jeffrey Wright, whose son is kidnapped. … There's not a lot of money at hand, and the ransom’s $17 million. And so he's put in this amazing situation of trying to decide: Does he do the right thing … and pay the ransom? Or does he save the money because he's got to make moves to protect the music label that he wants to keep in his name and further his career? … And the thing with Spike Lee is he's such an auteur that he always takes a lot of wild, creative swings. And like any great baseball player, you're going to strike out. But when the bat connects with the ball, it's exciting watching it fly over the fence. And Highest 2 Lowest has far more home run moments than not.” Lemire: “It’s Spike’s most purely entertaining film since Inside Man, which is one of my favorite Spike Lee films, which also happened to star Denzel Washington. Nobody depicts New York like Spike Lee. The centerpiece of this is this chase … on a 4 train going from Brooklyn to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. And this is the literal and figurative highest to lowest for Denzel here. … It is so expertly shot and paced, and it captures the energy of being in New York on that train.” Nobody 2 Bob Odenkirk is back as a mild-mannered former assassin/dad in the action sequel. Sharon Stone plays the villain. Lemire: “Bob Odenkirk is back in a role … assassin badass, and he'd been doing a bunch of very, very violent jobs for bad people for a long time, and he just wants to live a quiet life, and take his family on vacation and go back to the place that was so meaningful to him as a child. … The fun of this is watching him in this seemingly wholesome, family-friendly setting, creating just absolute bloody mayhem. … The craziness of these fight sequences, that's the star.” Edwards: “Sharon Stone as the villain was everything, and she ran a casino, I thought that was hilarious. … She's so over the top. She's great. And so was Colin Hanks, the son of Tom Hanks, who plays this wacky sheriff character. I thought it was the secondary characters that made Nobody 2 — gave it its energy. … Every one of these movies is still chasing the blueprint of Die Hard, but nevertheless, it's entertaining. … And Bob Odenkirk still amazes with the duality that he perfectly executes in these movies. I mean, he's Clark Kent and Superman without the glasses and the cape.” Went Up the Hill The spirit of a recently deceased woman inhabits the bodies of her son, Jack (Dacre Montgomery), and her wife, Jill (Vicky Krieps). Lemire: “This is a really minimalist and spare and very cool ghost story. It is meticulous in its production design, cinematography, pacing. … It's what happens when Jack and Jill stay in this house together, and how the ghost of the woman that connects them, haunts them alternately, back and forth. And it's really cool the way that that presence manifests itself within each person, and how that relationship evolves in ways that are suspenseful and sometimes really icky. … It is about how people deal with grief and sorrow and loss, and it's quite melancholy and sad." Edwards: “I felt like I was watching a bad art installation at a museum, and I was ready to leave after my second cocktail. I felt like the filmmaker was trying way too hard with the dialogue metaphors and with the visual metaphors. And it's too moody for its own good. And there's a chilliness that almost overshadows the proceedings to a fault. It does work as this weird body swap movie, but it got so bizarre for me, I just wanted to scream.” The Knife Police find a mysterious woman lying unconscious and holding a knife in a family’s home. Former NFL player-turned-filmmaker Nnamdi Asoumgha stars and directs this suspense drama. Edwards: “It's too blunt, it's too in your face. It's hitting you over the head. You already know where this is going after like minute two. Now, the direction is solid, the pacing is deliberately effective, and it's a great debut by Nnamdi Asoumgha. And Melissa Leo is fabulous as she proceeds to interrogate the members of the family in an attempt to find out what actually happened. But with that said, I personally found this film very, very difficult to watch because the story, it just really hits too close to home, and I am just not interested in participating in any Black trauma.” Lemire: “People make bad decisions early on, and [Nnamdi Asoumgha] speaks to that in a voiceover. People make bad decisions and have to live with the consequences of it, and so the tension just comes from: who's gonna say what, when? … Melissa Leo is just chilling in this as the detective who is investigating. She's very sly. … I thought Aja Naomi King was very good, too, as the wife who's just trying to protect her family. It is hard to watch. But as a genre exercise, as an exercise in just building tension, it was quite effective and an auspicious filmmaking debut for Nnamdi Asoumgha.”
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