Despite a soppy title and a sketchy, uninspired poster, A Little Princess belongs to that elite corps, the really outstanding family movie. After nearly 10 years as the best known black director in the world, and a recent string of unsatisfactory projects, he needs to establish himself afresh. Downbeat is big box-office at the moment, but the artificial depressiveness of Seven is very far from Clockers. The ending of the film has a distinct tang of the TV movie, with an issue that has been treated with apparent commitment being filed abruptly away. This may not be Lee’s doing (Price co-wrote the script), and Clockers remains a powerful piece of work, but it isn’t quite what his career needs. Clockers is a resolutely downbeat story, in which stylistic flourishes – escapism on the level of technique – don’t belong.It’s downbeat at least until the end, when Price’s story drops its disguise of research and suddenly offers us contrived little vistas of redemption.

While Victor is being interrogated, Klein tells him, “I want to see what you see.” Next thing we know, there’s a little reflection of Klein bobbing on the filmy surface of Victor’s eye – a startling image, and well contrived, but as distracting as a firework at a funeral.Later, when Klein is coaching Tyrone in false testimony that will get him out of trouble, the scene is shot like a rock video, with Keitel appearing in a bizarre variety of places to prompt Tyrone with what he should say. Sometimes, though, he seems to remember that he is a world famous director, and goes for an inappropriately fancy shot – a prestige shot. A hardened young offender shrivels with the abhorred syllables: “Cedric Stanley Gilmore.”Spike Lee uses twitchy camera movements for the scenes of clockers selling in the projects, and gets good work from his novice director of photography, Malik Hassan Sayeed. She goes up to kids who have renamed themselves Go or Skills or Scientific, and calls them by their christened names.

Strike, aged 19, gets to play dad to a 12-year-old, telling him this is grown-up stuff, showing him how to cut crack with a playing card, and never ever to try what you sell.It’s hard to say whether this is a film with little room for women, or if it shows us a world where women are reduced to picking up the pieces. At least Tyrone’s mother has a magnificent scene where she warns the clockers against corrupting her son. There’s a strand of the film in which Strike, himself Rodney’s protege, tries to recruit even younger Tyrone (Pee Wee Love), buying him haircuts and hi-tech toys, letting him play with the elaborate train set that represents the possibility of escape, as well as the fact that the world runs on fixed tracks. It strips people down to bare need.There’s a real shortage of biological fathers in the film, and that’s part of Rodney’s advantage: he can train kids to be killed or arrested, and they’ll be grateful for the attention. He goes on: “If God created anything better than crack cocaine, he kept that shit for himself.” Crack for Rodney isn’t a pleasure drug – he doesn’t take it himself – but a truth drug.

Rodney has a striking speech at one point, praising what he sells as “the world’s greatest product”. What he is, essentially, is Fagin in Brooklyn, catching kids young and teaching them the only trade they will ever know. Rodney has a real estate licence and a barber shop, but he runs the local gangs of clockers. But there is also Rodney (Delroy Lindo), a pillar of local business who is nevertheless part of what is bringing the community to its knees. In what would be a running joke if Clockers admitted any but the grimmest comedy, Klein never believes it’s his bleeper going off: he assumes it’s a drug-related message being sent to the pager of whichever kid he is talking to at the time.There is, in fact, another good policeman, who is black and still lives on the project.

But by the end of the film, even the apparently hard bitten Strike is asking Detective Klein what makes him care, when the others are all “blase, blase”. If you don’t want to hear the sticky noise, moreover, made by blood-soaked hair when it’s peeled from the pavement, this would be a good moment to put a few fingers in your ears. The detectives seem to be jeering at the dead man as much as gathering clues, and the corpse is actively dishonoured by their attentions. And there’s Rocco Klein, played by Harvey Keitel, the latest in a long line (Thelma and Louise, Mortal Thoughts) of harsh but humane policemen to be played by this actor. Admittedly, in his first extended scene, he doesn’t seem any less antagonistic than his colleagues.This is an outstandingly upsetting sequence in which the body is examined outside the fast-food restaurant.