Best Ever
Drama Movie?

The block is Stuyvesant Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The day is the hottest of the summer. By nightfall, someone will be dead, a pizzeria will be burning, and America will be confronted with questions it still hasn’t answered. Spike Lee made Do the Right Thing in 1989, and thirty-five years later it plays like prophecy — or maybe just like history repeating itself because we refused to learn.

The structure is deceptively loose. We follow Mookie, played by Lee himself, as he delivers pizzas for Sal’s Famous, the Italian-American joint that’s been on this Black block for twenty-five years. We meet the neighborhood: Da Mayor, the gentle drunk; Mother Sister, who watches everything from her window; Radio Raheem, whose boombox plays Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” on endless repeat; Buggin’ Out, who wants to know why there are no Black faces on Sal’s Wall of Fame. Nothing happens, and everything simmers.

The cinematography by Ernest Dickerson is aggressive in a way that mirrors the heat. Canted angles, tight close-ups, lenses that distort faces into confrontation. The color palette is saturated past realism — reds and oranges that make you feel the temperature. Lee and Dickerson wanted the audience to be uncomfortable, to feel the pressure building before they understood what it was building toward.

Danny Aiello’s Sal is the film’s moral puzzle. He’s not a racist, exactly — he loves the neighborhood, takes pride in feeding it, treats Mookie with something like paternal affection. But he’s also a man who won’t put Black faces on his wall because it’s his place and he can do what he wants. The film refuses to make him a villain. It just shows how that attitude, multiplied across a society, becomes a system. Aiello earned an Oscar nomination for making Sal human enough to implicate us.

Radio Raheem’s death — choked by police after a fight in the pizzeria — was controversial in 1989. Critics worried the film would incite violence. What it actually depicted was a pattern: Black man killed by police, community erupts, property burns. The film ends with two quotes, one from Martin Luther King Jr. about the futility of violence, one from Malcolm X about self-defense being intelligence. Lee doesn’t choose between them. He presents both. The choice is yours.

The riot sequence is filmed like a nightmare that makes too much sense. Mookie throws the trash can through Sal’s window. The crowd pours in. The flames rise. The cops do nothing to save the business but everything to protect themselves. In the morning, Mookie comes back for his pay, and he and Sal have a conversation that answers nothing and acknowledges everything. They’ll see each other again. The block will still be there. The heat will come back next summer.

Lee caught criticism for not providing solutions, for ending on ambiguity rather than resolution. But that ambiguity is the film’s honesty. Solutions would have been a lie. The questions Do the Right Thing asks — about property versus people, about violence and its causes, about who belongs where — don’t have easy answers. The film’s job is to make you feel them, to put you on that block as the temperature rises.

It’s still rising.

Spike Lee: The Best Ever is heat as politics. Is Do the Right Thing the Best Ever Protest Movie? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Criterion Collection Blu-ray includes Lee’s commentary and extensive historical context.
• The 4K UHD release brings out every bead of sweat in Dickerson’s cinematography.
• The 30th Anniversary Edition includes new features reflecting on the film’s continued relevance.