As the world watched in horror, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Like many who watched the unfolding drama on television news, director Spike Lee was shocked not only by the scale of the disaster, but by the slow, inept and disorganized response of the emergency and recovery effort. Lee was moved to document this modern American tragedy, a morality play witnessed by people all around the world. The result is When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. The film is structured in four acts, each dealing with a different aspect of the events that preceded and followed Katrina's catastrophic passage through New Orleans.

"Surely the most magnificent and large-souled record of a great American tragedy ever put on film." David Denby, The New Yorker

"Spike Lee's monumental look at Katrina is richly detailed and realistically complex." The Hollywood Reporter

"Even more than Do the Right Thing, until now Lee's major achievement, When the Levees Broke is simultaneously his most searing and topical movie and the one most assured of enduring." The Houston Chronicle

"Charged with profound sorrow, galvanizing outrage and defiant resolve." Variety

"It's not necessarily the drama inherent in these stories that moved some to tears — and it's possible that some audiences won't recognize the restraint Lee exercised in rendering them — it's the heartbreaking matter-of-factness." Salon.com

"What breaks your heart is the film's accumulated firsthand stories of New Orleans residents who lost everything in the flood after Hurricane Katrina, and the dismaying conclusion that a year after the disaster, the broken city has been largely abandoned." Stephen Holden, The New York Times

"When the Levees Broke is like the New Orleans jazz funeral — a dirge on the way to the cemetery, an up-tempo parade in the deceased's honor on the bittersweet walk back home." Los Angeles Times