RANSOM NOTES

“Highest 2 Lowest.”

- BY RICHARD BRODY

Denzel Washington plays a music executive in Spike Lee's film.

It's fascinating when filmmakers make drastic late-career shifts, as Martin Scorsese did with “The Wolf of Wall Street” and Francis Ford Coppola recently did with “Megalopolis.” Now it’s Spike Lee’s turn, and in his new drama, “Highest 2 Lowest,” he shifts in a surprising way. The film is a remake of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's 1963 drama “High and Low,” among the greatest police procedurals. Lee turns the story into what is one of his most personal films, both emotionally and intellectually. Often, directors’ self-transformations involve changes in modes of production: Scorsese broke away from the studios and found independent financing; Coppola self-financed. Lee, who has had his own production company throughout his career, makes “Highest 2 Lowest” a film about his particular modes of production, one that focuses on the underlying notion of owning the means of production.