Spike Lee's new film BlacKkKlansman has premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was reportedly met with a six-minute standing ovation.
The movie tells the true story of an undercover African-American detective and his Jewish partner who team up to infiltrate Ku Klux Klan in 1979.
It currently has a 100 percent rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, with reviewers praising its "very timely message".
Although it's set nearly four decades ago, Lee has multiple references to current US president Donald Trump in the film - ending it with footage of the former Celebrity Apprentice host refusing to condemn the actions of the white supremacists behind the deadly Charlottesville riot.
"[BlacKkKlansman] responds fiercely and contemptuously to the crassness at the heart of the Trump regime and gleefully pays it back in its own coin," writes Peter Bradshaw for the Guardian.
"Lee plays with allusions to Trump and our present-day American mess throughout the film, sometimes more corny and winky than others, but the final minutes remove any semblance of joking," writes Emily Yoshida for Vulture.
"BlacKkKlansman is a nuanced story of race in America, but Lee doesn't take any chances with vagueness or ellipses, nor should he."
Jason Gorber uses a crass analogy to compare the film to classic American cinema in his review for Dork Shelf: "BlacKkKlansman is an excoriating, unapologetic shit on the chest of Trumpians and their nativist agenda, and may well serve as one of the defining films of this era just as Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind did in theirs."
Variety, which reported on the extended standing ovation the premiere received, also described BlacKkKlansman as "one of few breakout discoveries" of this year's Cannes Film Festival.
"Lee will surely be a strong contender for the Cannes best-director prize and he may even bag the Palme d'Or, the festival's top honour," the publication said.
"If he does, it would be retribution after Do the Right Thing was infamously passed over for the award when it screened at the 1989 edition of Cannes."
BlacKkKlansman is set for release in the US on August 10.
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