there was a contemporary punk band from New York's Lower East Side. Adrien Brody's nose was broken during the climactic fight scene in which his character Ritchie is brutally beaten by his friends. The sex orgy scene at Plato's Retreat included more explicit shots in the original cut but was edited after the MPAA threatened the film with an "NC-17" rating. Reception Summer of Sam premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 1999, and was released in the United States on July 2. It received mixed reviews from critics. The film has an approval rating of 50% at Rotten Tomatoes based on 104 reviews, with a weighted average of 5.50/10. The site's consensus states: "Spike Lee offers intense visuals but his storytelling feels crowded and overambitious". On Metacritic, the film has a score of 67 out of 100 based on reviews from 26 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade D− on scale of A to F. According to film academic R. Barton Palmer in 2011, it continues to be widely viewed as Spike Lee's most controversial film, "issuing a cynical appeal to trashy tastes", which has "prevented some critics from according it more than cursory consideration". Many critics objected to its frankly unromantic, starkly realistic (if hardly pornographic, in the usual sense) handling of sexual themes, as well as for its pervasive street language" and "what some saw as [Lee's] bitterly negative and even defamatory representations of white ethnic culture". Reviewing the film in 1999, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times stated "Lee is a powerful filmmaker who certainly knows how to have an impact on an audience, but those who survive his ministrations are likely to wonder if in this case the battle was worth the bruises". More positive was Todd McCarthy of Variety, who thought "this is the closest Lee has yet come to Scorsese territory!" In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave it three-and-a-half out of four stars and regarded the screenplay as more of "an analytical outsider's view" of provincial scapegoating rather than "the inside, autobiographical job of a Martin Scorsese film". In the spirit of Lee's best work, Summer of Sam "vibrates with fear, guilt and lust", Ebert wrote. "It's not about the killer, but about his victims—not those he murdered, but those whose overheated imaginations bloomed into a lynch mob mentality. There is