One of the most iconic pairings in movie history, Denzel Washington and Spike Lee are together again, reteaming for the 2025 new movie Highest 2 Lowest. With the movie, Lee is paying homage to one of his cinematic icons, as the movie is his own interpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime drama High and Low.
During a talk at a film festival in 2024, Lee said that while attending New York University film school he first got to see Kurosawa movies, which inspired him throughout his career. Specifically, he said how he took the three different perspectives presented in Rashomon and tweaked the idea for his breakout movie, She’s Gotta Have It.
But Highest 2 Lowest is the closest that Lee has come to straight adapting a Kurosawa movie, but of course we can expect plenty of unique aspects that only the Oscar-winning Spike Lee can provide.
Read on for everything you need to know about Highest 2 Lowest.
Highest 2 Lowest release date
A24 is releasing Highest 2 Lowest on August 22 in select US movie theaters. Two weeks later, on September 5, the movie is set to premiere on the Apple TV Plus streaming service worldwide.
This will all follow the movie’s world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, taking place May 13-24, where it is being shown out of competition.
This is another A24 title that moviegoers can enjoy this year. Among the other A24 2025 movies are Parthenope, Warfare, Friendship, Materialists, Sorry, Baby, Eddington and The Smashing Machine.
Highest 2 Lowest cast
Washington stars in Highest 2 Lowest as a music mogul whose life gets turned upside down by a ransom plot. This marks the fifth time that Washington and Lee have collaborated, with the previous four being Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game and Inside Man. Highest 2 Lowest is their first collaboration in 19 years.
The other credited Highest 2 Lowest cast per A24 are Jeffrey Wright whose recent credits include The Last of Us season 2, The Agency and an Oscar-nominated performance in American Fiction; Ilfenesh Hadera, currently starring in Godfather of Harlem and having previously worked with Lee on Oldboy (2013) and the TV adaptation of She’s Gotta Have It; and A$AP Rocky, the Grammy-nominated rapper whose acting credits include Dope, Monster and the upcoming A24 movie If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Highest 2 Lowest plot
With Alan Fox penning the adaptation, here is the official synopsis for Highest 2 Lowest:
“When a titan music mogul, widely known as having the ‘best ears in the business,’ is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma. Brothers Denzel Washington and Spike Lee reunite for the fifth in their long working relationship for a reinterpretation of the great filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s crime thriller High and Low, now played out on the mean streets of modern day New York City.”
Highest 2 Lowest trailer
A teaser trailer for Highest 2 Lowest is now online, available to watch directly below. Can you handle it?:
Spike Lee movies
Spike Lee is one of the most renowned filmmakers of the last 40-plus years, responsible for a number of classics and a five-time Oscar nominee, with one win to his name. You’re likely familiar with many of Lee’s joints (what he calls his movies), but here is the full list of his feature directing credits for reference:
- Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983)
- She’s Gotta Have It (1986)
- School Daze (1988)
- Do the Right Thing (1989)
- Mo’ Better Blues (1990)
- Jungle Fever (1991)
- Malcolm X (1992)
- Crooklyn (1994)
- Clockers (1995)
- Lumiere and Company (1995)
- Girl 6 (1996)
- Get on the Bus (1996)
- 4 Little Girls (1997)
- He Got Game (1998)
- Summer of Sam (1999)
- The Original Kings of Comedy (2000)
- Bamboozeled (2000)
- 25th Hour (2002)
- She Hate Me (2004)
- Inside Man (2006)
- Miracle at St. Anna (2008)
- Passing Strange (2009)
- Red Hook Summer (2012)
- Bad 25 (2012)
- Oldboy (2013)
- Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014)
- Chi-Raq (2015)
- Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall (2016)
- Pass Over (2018)
- BlackKklansman (2019)
- Da 5 Bloods (2020)
- David Byrne’s American Utopia (2020)
Highest 2 Lowest behind the scenes
Highest 2 Lowest is a co-production between A24 and Apple Original Films, along with Lee’s own 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks, plus production houses Escape Artists, Juniper Productions, Kurosawa Productions Co. and Mandalay Pictures.
Jason Michael Berman and Todd Black are the producers on the movie, with Lee as one of the executive producers. Also an executive producer on the movie is Ko Kurosawa, Akira Kurosawa’s grandson.
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