Metacritic-Rezensionen

Mr. Lee means for Malcolm X to be an epic, and it is in its concerns and its physical scope. In Denzel Washington it also has a fine actor who does for Malcolm X what Ben Kingsley did for “Gandhi.” [18 November 1992]

The film is inspirational and educational - and it is also entertaining, as movies must be before they can be anything else.

Lee's finest, most unabashed labor of love.

A spiritually enriching testament to the human capacity for change -- and surely Spike Lee's most universally appealing film.

Lee's biography of the slain civil rights leader treats Malcolm, not as a political rallying point, but as a fully rounded individual whose life defies reduction to symbolic status.

A mortal movie about an immortal subject and the very fact that it succeeds as well as it does is a testament to Lee's skills as a filmmaker.

The picture comes up short in several departments, notably in pacing and in giving a strong sense of why this man became such a legend.

The movie is disappointingly impersonal; it doesn't provide readers of the autobiography anything like a fresh vision of its remarkable subject.

Lee's film suffers from message over substance and is slightly tedious as a result.

Lee has tried hard to give this shapeless picture some visual patterning though the cluttered effect created by his mistrust of silence is even more harmful than in the past.