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.

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.

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.

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.

It's not especially horrifying, or even very thought-provoking. It is touching, however, because it represents one frequently misunderstood, intermittently great filmmaker's tribute to another.

It's tempting to call the film muddled and be done with it, but there's an inventiveness and beauty to Lee's visuals here ... and an experimentation in the execution that's hard to ignore.

With no one breathing down Lee's neck, it's free to zoom all over the place - from seriousness to high comedy to weird comedy to quietly anxious set pieces.

"Sweet Blood" is idiosyncratic and sultry, simultaneously nodding to film conventions and striding boldly down its own path.

An interesting study in mashing up race and class stereotypes, though the film's rambling plot may leave your brain feeling a little mashed, too.

Free of studio meddling, Lee gets to wallow in the excessive violence and comedy typical of an old grindhouse film.

Lee augments the hectic clash of violence and sex with the pressures of intellectual disputations and the unchallenged power of wealth.

A dizzying hall-of-mirrors stunt, a horror remake as autobiographical X-ray, and a work of fantasy that serves as a decadently cleansing creative exorcism.

Da Sweet Blood of Jesus is often a very mysterious, funny, and unnerving film. At other times, it feels like the best Lee could do with limited resources and a flurry of content.