Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4778 in DVD
• Released on: 1999-02-23
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 114 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Spike Lee's semiautobiographical, 1994 film about the good and bad times for a Brooklyn family in the '70s has passion and nostalgic good feeling, but it is also a mess of random reflections and arbitrary storytelling. The centerpiece of the movie is a little girl (Zelda Harris) who views the ups and downs of her parents' experiences (mom and dad are played by Delroy Lindo and Alfre Woodard), and who navigates the life of her neighborhood. Lee tosses in a lot of '70s detail (watching The Partridge Family) and other diversions (Harris's journey through suburbia), but he has no master sensibility controlling the flow of it all. The film is more wearying than anything, although bright spots include Lindo's fine performance as a talented man suffering from irrelevance. --Tom Keogh

From The New Yorker
Spike Lee's movie, a nostalgia piece about growing up in Brooklyn in the early seventies, is slight in every respect but length. The picture runs well over two hours, and you feel every minute of it, because Lee can't seem to find a theme or a style to shape this amorphous memory stuff into something more compelling than a home movie. Without an explosive, talk-show-worthy subject, his filmmaking tends to go limp. This movie lurches forward in spurts, but keeps stalling, because all that's driving it is a sort of trivial, reflexive New York chauvinism. Instead of telling a story, Lee settles for delivering casual, off-the-cuff commentary on urban life: he's just a guy sitting on the stoop checking out what's happening on the block-not much, as it turns out. With Alfre Woodard, Delroy Lindo, Zelda Harris, and Frances Foster. The screenplay is by the director and two of his siblings, Joie Susannah Lee and Cinqué Lee. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

A tree grows in Crooklyn
Ahhh who can forget the good Ol' days of Spike Lee films that had heart as well as insight? Who can forget this gem?
Crooklyn is loosely based on Spike Lee's life growing up. Its mostly a story that mostly details the struggles of a family growing up in Brooklyn as seen through the eyes of Troy(played by Zelda Harris). There are beautiful performances to be seen here. Alfre Woodard's presense is felt as the stern but loving mother of four kids and Delroy Lindo's is great as the father who is also dealing with pressure as a struggling musician and trying to pay the rent on time. They go through the normal strife that any black family has to go through in poor areas but they still find a way to maintain. I remember as a kid that the last scene with the mom passing on had me choked up. Troy and her brother holding hands at the reception for the funeral was a touching scene too. They drove each other crazy but it was still love in the end. Crooklyn has brief moments of awareness like one scene in particular: Troy's aunt comparing troy's hair to her adopted child's hair saying that the adopted child's hair was good hairnad that Troy's hair was rough was a sublte form of self-hatred but most people wouldnt pick up on that. Of course Spike Lee has to make an appearance in the movie. He plays a junkie who chases kids around trying to steal money from them. In short Crooklyn stands out as one the best dramas of all time and one of Spike Lee's best work. The characters are ones that you care about, their struggles are real and anybody who has been there can also relate. Two thumbs up for Spike Lee's work of art on film.

Spike Lee With Heart!
This is a wonderful movie. My favorite from Spike Lee. It tells an autobiographical story about a mother dying from cancer and its effect on the youngest girl in the house. It uses a lot of fun techniques to create a nostalgic mood for the 1970s and offers differences between urban and suburban African-American lifestyles in a hilarious comparison. The movie has quite a bit of love in it and that carries the story above and beyond the usual family history movie. The girl's impression of the local drug addicts are hilarious. They are seen as crazies who are harmless but still scary to young children. The father is a jazz musician who makes a varied amount of money that the family can't depend on so the mother's loss is felt even more acutely.

Lee's trip down memory lane
Crookyln involes Spike Lee's trip down memory lane and it's a memorable one. The cinematography and script are all excellent as always and the soundtrack represents the seventies very well. The film's only down point is that it's a bit long but still a great heartwarming film.