

A successful and married black man contemplates having an affair with a white girl from work. He's quite rightly worried that the racial difference would make an already taboo relationship even worse.
Acting
Samuel L. Jackson's Gator is devastating—crack-era Shakespeare.
Direction
Spike's camera prowls, judges, and mourns in equal measure.
Writing
The dinner table scenes are masterclasses in escalating tension.

Director
Spike Lee
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Samuel L. Jackson was literally fresh out of rehab when he played Gator; Spike wrote the part specifically for him after their work together in School Daze.
The 'Stevie Wonder' title track and that brutal crackhouse sequence became instant shorthand for early-90s Black cinema's willingness to show what Cosby-era respectability politics refused to acknowledge.
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