Unusually rich, absorbing and often brilliant film-making, an epic deserving of the description. But that doesn't stop it from being worryingly ambiguous.

The film has no psychological depth and not much sense of history. It takes a purely surface view of people and events.

The movie is long -- 202 minutes -- but Lee earns every tick of the clock, illuminating the many developmental moments in Malcolm X’s personality.

30 years on, Spike Lee’s ambitious biographical epic Malcolm X still has not lost its educational, entertaining and emotional power.