Spike Lee has another big hit on his hands after his new film BlacKkKlansman landed the biggest standing ovation from critics at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday (14May18).
The movie, starring Denzel Washington's son John David Washington as the first African-American detective to serve in the Colorado Springs Police Department, centres around the cop's efforts to infiltrate and expose the Ku Klux Klan in his first assignment.
BlacKkKlansman, produced by the team behind Get Out, was given a 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes on Monday, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
In addition, it was reported that viewers broke out in applause at several moments throughout the screening, and at the conclusion of the movie, Lee was seen being given a hug by Dunkirk director Christopher Nolan.
Washington and his co-stars Topher Grace and Adam Driver were also at the premiere, with Driver also appearing in the festival's closing night film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Earlier reviews of BlacKkKlansman have also been positive, with a writer from The Guardian describing the film as an "entertaining spectacle" and "clanging rebuke to the New Trump Order", while a Vulture critic dubbing the movie "one of his most flat-out entertaining films in years".
Speaking about the film with The Hollywood Reporter recently, Lee explained that the project was first brought to him by Get Out writer/director Jordan Peele, and he was immediately intrigued by the narrative due to the social and political climate in the U.S. at the time, especially with the Unite the Right rally occurring in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.
"I mean, No. 1, there was a murder. Susan Bro lost her daughter. And then No. 2, Agent Orange (U.S. President Donald Trump) refused to repudiate the Klan, the alt-right and the Nazis. 'There's good people on both sides.' That's gonna be on his gravestone. He's on the wrong side of history," he said of the protests.
The provocative project is vying for the Cannes Film Festival's prestigious Palme d'Or prize, and is up against films such as Everybody Knows, which stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, David Robert Mitchell's Under the Silver Lake, as well as Jean-Luc Godard's The Image Book.
BlacKkKlansman, which also features Harry Belafonte and Laura Harrier, is due to hit cinemas from early August.
