Do the Right Thing

Dir. Spike Lee. 1989, 120 mins. 35mm. With Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, John Turturro. One of the most aesthetically accomplished and intentionally incendiary American films, Spike Lee’s full-throttle portrait of a particularly eventful, hot summer day in the life of a Bed-Stuy neighborhood is a remarkable dramatization of irreconcilable race relations in America. The phenomenal cast (including Aiello as pizza man Sal, Lee as delivery boy Mookie, and Davis as an apartment-stoop prophet), the endlessly inventive visuals, and the charged political discussion made this an epochal cultural moment that retains its power to this day.