Curator Watchlist
A forceful, ambitious war drama that mixes adventure, grief, political anger, and historical reckoning. It’s messy by design, but the emotional intensity, vivid performances, and Spike Lee’s restless style make it a memorable watch.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 2h 35m
Director: Spike Lee
Starring: Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters
Four African-American Vietnam veterans return to Vietnam. They are in search of the remains of their fallen squad leader and the promise of buried treasure. These heroes battle forces of humanity and nature while confronted by the lasting ravages of the immorality of the Vietnam War.
Spike Lee
Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters
A forceful, ambitious war drama that mixes adventure, grief, political anger, and historical reckoning. It’s messy by design, but the emotional intensity, vivid performances, and Spike Lee’s restless style make it a memorable watch.
Da 5 Bloods is less a conventional war movie than a collision of genres: reunion drama, treasure hunt, historical essay, and trauma study. Spike Lee uses the Vietnam setting to examine how the war’s violence echoes through Black American life, and he does it with urgency, anger, and a lot of formal energy. The result is uneven, but rarely dull.
Delroy Lindo is the film’s anchor, giving a raw, volatile performance that keeps the emotional stakes alive even when the movie gets sprawling. The ensemble dynamic is strong too, especially as the film shifts between camaraderie, regret, and old wounds that never healed. Lee’s visual style can be brash, but that brashness fits the material.
What lingers most is the film’s refusal to separate personal memory from national history. It’s about buried gold, but also buried guilt, buried bodies, and the way the past keeps resurfacing. If you respond to films that are passionate, imperfect, and politically alive, this is very much worth your time.
Karsten (4★) · 2018 likes
I hope this makes sense: the colorful, psychedelic imagery in the poster wasn’t really in the film, but I still felt that. Ya know? Spike Lee is so good at giving you a physical reaction.
Brian Tallerico (4.5★) · 1216 likes
Felt like a shock to the system after weeks of lazy, passionless filmmaking. It is the story of two wars that never ended - Vietnam and civil rights - and it contains stunning work from Lindo, Majors, Blanchard, and Lee.
Josh Lewis (4★) · 994 likes
Spike lee does The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as men-on-a-mission, hangout/heist picture through black history and Vietnam only instead of being slowly corrupted by greed Lee wrestles with how we are already corrupted and haunted by imperialism, whether we understand exactly how or why or the all-consuming depth of it or not. Delroy Lindo gives one of the most brutally sad, destructive performances in a Lee joint (no small feat, especially considering his own in Crooklyn) playing a man
fran hoepfner (2.5★) · 988 likes
last night my mom texted me "Delroy Lindo" at 10:30pm with nothing else and I have to say that I agree
Jay (4★) · 744 likes
nothing gets a film party going better than a bong hit and a spike lee joint
A war film that blends combat, memory, and philosophical reflection into something expansive and haunted.
Combines a military mission, satire, and moral unease in a way that overlaps with this film’s genre-mixing energy.
Another Spike Lee war drama focused on Black soldiers, history, and the emotional cost of combat.
A politically charged war film about occupation, resistance, and the machinery of violence.
An unflinching, traumatic war experience that prioritizes psychological devastation over battlefield heroics.
A classic anti-war statement about institutional cruelty and the human cost of military power.
Shares a serious moral weight and a focus on conscience under the pressure of history and violence.
Though not on the same political wavelength, it matches the long shadow Vietnam casts over friendship and identity.
A harrowing historical drama about war, survival, and the lingering damage of geopolitical catastrophe.
A Vietnam-era reckoning centered on disillusionment, injury, and the cost of patriotic mythmaking.
A brutal, ground-level war film about endurance, futility, and the dehumanizing grind of combat.
Not a war film, but it shares the rough camaraderie, bitterness, and emotional bruising of men on the move.
Vietnam War aftermath, Black American history, historical trauma, male friendship, grief and guilt, imperialism, treasure hunt, generational memory
Vietnam War, ensemble drama, political drama, historical trauma, treasure hunt, psychological intensity, anti-war, road movie, social commentary, 2020s cinema