Concept: A young man in the 1950s gets involved in crime but moves through adversity and conversion to become the controversial civil rights leader Malcolm X (based on the true story).

• • This movie is not just about historical events; it is an historical event in itself, not in the sense of cinematic history but in the sense of overall history.
  • One can tell that the intent of the director (the renown Spike Lee) was not just to illustrate the life of Malcolm X but to cinematically bring him to life and bring him into our present, to have him speak to our today as if he were alive. And Lee succeeded in accomplishing this.
  • Although the movie shows great movie-making craft and a career-defining performance by Denzel Washington, it’s hard to judge this movie as a movie, by its cinematographic merits alone. It seems to transcend the medium.
  • Although it’s a movie about Malcolm X, it’s in some ways a movie about three people—the youth who was seduced by the temptations of the world around him, the bright rising star of the Nation of Islam, and the wiser and older civil rights leader—as well as the circumstances and decisions that led to the transitions between those stages.
  • The movie is careful to always set Malcolm X in the broader context of his own culture, the broader society, and the happenings of his day.
  • Although the movie tries to be hopeful in the end, I couldn’t help but get a sense of despair as a viewer today in 2021. The movie was made 30 years ago about events that occurred 30 years before that, and yet so little has changed. The movie is sadly still relevant.
  • Viewed on an Optoma HD28DSE projector, 92” screen, Hulu on Roku. The video quality of the movie was not good; it looked like an old movie, little more than DVD quality. Sometimes I suspect that with older movies, that you get a significantly lower-grade digital version in streaming compared to Blu-Ray; that would be unfortunate, since more people will probably see this movie on streaming than by purchasing the Blu-Ray. The screenshots I see of this movie on Blu-Ray review web sites look a whole lot better than what I saw streaming. It reminds me of the TV days in the 1970s and 80s—when you saw a movie shown prime time on network television, you saw the movie in pristine version (because they were broadcasting from 35mm prints), while the monster movies you saw after coming home from school on a local syndicated station would show 16mm prints (I think) and even a kid like me could tell the quality difference like it was night and day. It seems that if any movie is over ten years old, you’ll more likely see a DVD-esque version of the movie on streaming, which is a shame with such a great movie as this one.

Malcolm X (1992) 90%