Id give it a B-.

What I liked;

Clarke Peters nailed his role.
Lots of the side characters were interesting.
Great sense of neighborhood

What I hated
The main character's acting wasn't strong enough to carry the film...his love interest was also pretty week.
Spike's preachy moments...particularly with the first part of the movie and I thought he overly stereotyped one of the chars(ill wait for more people to see it to debate this point)

People are complaining about the twist but I thought it actually served it's purpose...without going into the specifics it's really the only way not to make the audience turn on the movie early on since its such a divisive issue.

The first act felt like a drag filled with lots of preacher in church moments which let Peters do his thing but did nothing to help with the pace/mood of the movie. And the ending? LOL. Not really spoiling anything but the movie began to end on the note of the kid going back to Atlanta....saying goodbye etc...standard fare. Rather then end it there, this nigga spike breaks out with a Wonder Years montage of the greatest summer ever in DIRECT contrast to what the movie was about/or showed you for two hours. It had the tone of a saturday morning cartoon, lol.

If he got stronger kid actors, ended the movie five minutes earlier, and trimmed down the church/preaching scenes in the beginning it would have been a good to great Spike Lee movie. For now I rate it in the middle of his catalog.