The film-maker’s ‘reinterpretation’ of the Kurosawa crime drama rails against AI, online media and new hip-hop but can’t find much new to say“We’re jazz musicians,” the director Spike Lee recently said of his working dynamic with Denzel Washington in Highest 2 Lowest, a new crime thriller that marks the fifth collaboration between the two Oscar winners. “We respect Julie Andrews singing My Favorite Things, but when John Coltrane did it, you know, or when Miles [Davis] did his standard of My Funny Valentine, it’s a different thing.”The metaphor is no throwaway. Since Lee’s breakout on to the cultural scene in the 1980s, the Atlanta-born, Brooklyn-made auteur has been at pains to style himself as an outgrowth of old school storytelling traditions even as critics tarred him as a new-school disrupter. From She’s Gotta Have It to Chi-Raq, Lee has made the extra effort to venerate the athletes, artists and thinkers who have shaped his distinctly analog worldview. Highest 2 Lowest was mean...