This is an intelligent conversation piece that will certainly not be for all tastes. And yet even its detractors can't deny Lee's compelling flavor.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus takes the basic plot of Ganja & Hess, its concerns about addiction, racial identity, and religiosity, and shifts the conversation to focus on the relationship between race, classism, and gender.

Spike Lee, the old guard of black indie filmmaking, gets his mojo back with this classy, urbane vampireish art film that is a beauty to behold. Sophisticated, demented, eerie, erotica, prepare to be shocked and flabbergasted.

It's a startlingly incompetent film, suggesting that we've reached a point where Lee's instincts as a filmmaker - so unimpeachable a quarter century ago - have abandoned him entirely.

Praise God. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is Spike Lee's freest-feeling endeavor in a spell.

Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a loving adaptation of Bill Gunn's 1973 Ganja & Hess.

Lee certainly doesn't schlock things up. But he doesn't add much excitement, either.

Our American addiction...bloodsucking from humanity in order to maintain the lifestyle to which we are accustomed. By the time Hess wearily muses, "I'm tired of this existence," it's more or less clear he means a spiritually empty capitalist existence...

An engaging work, one that finds Spike Lee adapting his considerable skills to a new genre. It's not his best movie, but it's definitely one of his most unlikely, and therefore most fascinating.

"Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" is a bold but wildly uneven, bloody mess of a film, sunk in large part by the subpar performances by nearly every major character in nearly every major role.

Never once does the film feel sharp on black identity (as did Bill Gunn's original), and the terror is theoretical only.

Thought-provoking but slow "vampire" movie from Spike Lee.

The film's execution doesn't serve its subject matter, making it feel more like an affected thesis than an effective work of art.

A curio that will likely only appeal to Spike Lee's most devoted fans - or those that contributed to the Kickstarter campaign that financed it.

It's clear Lee has some inexplicable love for the source material but he doesn't give us any reason to feel the same way.

... an audacious but muddled character study that nevertheless proves the veteran filmmaker can never be easily dismissed.

The film is a hypnotically nightmarish mood piece more than anything else; it makes sense and yet doesn't make sense, in the way that dreams do and don't make sense.

Spike Lee makes some interesting creative choices, but his film lacks a pulse.

Unrepentant, uneven and unique, "Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" proves that Lee can still make a film worthy of the arguments it will most certainly start.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is a mess, but it's the kind of mess only one of our greatest filmmakers could make.