Political spinelessness, not aesthetics, motivates such assertions, which of course go entirely unsubstantiated. I have never seen anything by Lee that was the slightest bit illuminating about the human condition. Lee excludes from the outset any effort to elucidate the circumstances of Berkowitz' life. We learn nothing about this background, his environment, his emotional difficulties. He is simply a monster, precisely as the Murdoch press presented him, or, if one wants to be charitable to the film and put the most complex face on it, the congealed expression of the city's tension and madness.
Nothing is made of the various cultural and social references.
The bits and pieces that flash across the screen add up to very little. As always in a Lee film, the goings-on are not invested with the slightest trace of social critique or protest. The low point of the film must be the fictional interview with a West Indian woman in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn who exults, for all intents and purposes, in the fact that white people are killing other white people. This, while young people were being shot in the head by a crazed gunman. I see no evidence to back up the assertions of Lee's artistic ability.