Cert 15 135mins Stars 5

Uncompromising director, Spike Lee, returns to the frontline of cinema with this urgent and extraordinary real life 1970’s crime thriller.

Packed full of tension, humour, great performances and Lee’s trademark political broadsides, it’s dressed in the funkadelic look of the era’s blacksploitation films and follows the first African American recruit of the Colorado police as he infiltrates the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

He’s played by a terrific John David Washington, who’s inherited much of the charisma, talent and the voice of his father, the Oscar winning-actor, Denzel.

As the eager undercover detective, Ron Stallworth, he begins his investigation by responding to a advert in the local press and asks to join the supposedly secretive society. He’s aided by his Jewish partner, played by Adam Driver, best known as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars films.

Ever alert to hypocrisy and the ridiculous, Lee angrily mocks the current political situation in this gobsmacking, terrifying and heroic examination of US society.