CINEMA: A Tree Strives in Brooklyn

Spike Lee is better at setting agendas than he is at making movies. The laudable intention behind Crooklyn is, he says, to move beyond "the hip-hop, drug, gangsta-rap, urban-inner-city movies," which he claims constitute "a rut" into which black filmmakers have fallen. He has a point, though some of his competitors' work (for example, The Inkwell) has shown more range than he cares to admit. What he does not have here is a movie that attractively accomplishes his goal.

The Carmichaels are a middle-class black family living in Brooklyn in the early '70s. The father, Woody (Delroy Lindo), is a jazz...