Clockers

Clockers is Spike Lee’s most complex, reined-in, and mature work to date, but it got the shaft both commercially and in terms of Oscar bouquets — a genuine crime in the face of stunning performances by Keitel (as a cop not quite as hard-nosed as he seems) and Mekhi Phifer (as a low-level drug pusher tormented by conscience). Based on the best-seller by Richard Price (who collaborated on the script with Lee), Clockers finds Lee for once subordinating his flashy film-school moves to the demands of narrative, creating an unsettling, moving portrait of a world where everyone carries his own heroes and villains within himself. A-