The story is ingenious but slightly cracked, never more so than when Stallworth bonds with David Duke (Topher Grace), the KKK Grand Wizard who puts a civilized face on racial terrorism. Adam Driver, as his fellow officer, joins the chapter in person and hoodwinks these small-town haters, who are so open about the ugliness of their “Keep America white!” paranoia that they could almost be…the voices of the alt-right today. It casts John David Washington as Ron Stallworth, a rookie cop as furtive as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who infiltrates the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan by impersonating a white racist over the phone. Set in Colorado Springs in the early ’70s, “BlacKkKlansman” is an undercover thriller, at once light-fingered, ominous, and deeply funny. Here, for the first time since then, he creates a scalding zeitgeist spectacle of American bigotry laid bare.
![movies from 2017 -2018 movies from 2017 -2018](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZWIxNzQzYmEtMjIyZC00YTZkLTk3ZjYtNTY0YWNhYTY4YTM3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI@._V1_.jpg)
Spike Lee has made three extraordinary films that toss incendiary racial firecrackers: the classic “Do the Right Thing” (1989), the majestic “Malcolm X” (1992), and the wild (and insanely underrated) black-face satire “Bamboozled” (2000).
![movies from 2017 -2018 movies from 2017 -2018](https://images.indianexpress.com/2017/07/mom-759.jpg)
Looking back on 12 days of discovery, here are a dozen films that most impressed Variety chief critics Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge. The 71st Cannes Film Festival may have gotten off to a bumpy start, underwhelming audiences with Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s Spanish-language “Everybody Knows” and taking several days to serve up anything that felt universally praised (eventual Palme d’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “ Shoplifters”), but by the end, even those who had arrived skeptical seemed to agree that the overall quality of this auteur-thin, American-light edition was higher than usual.