Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee, 2025)Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, which premiered Out of Competition at this year’s Cannes, is a giddy, gritty reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) that trades out the Japanese classic’s postwar-Tokyo setting for a contemporary New York City marked by stark divisions of class and race. Was Highest 2 Lowest built around Denzel? The way that’s set up in the script and plays out in the first half, in particular, reminded me of a classic melodrama. The extremes come naturally because that’s New York today, which is why we had to shoot there. We’re on the train for the ransom-delivery scene, when the “highest” meets the “lowest” and David first encounters the kidnapper, Yung Felon, and his lackeys.