Do the Right Thing (1989): A

As Nashville is to Robert Altman and 2001: A Space Odyssey to Stanley Kubrick, so too is Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing as perfectly representative of a total filmmaking talent as any movie yet made, and one of the great American films. A sun-stroked Brooklyn neighborhood is the canvas on which director/writer/performer Lee paints, the coral reef through which he weaves us. The many joys of the film - the celebration of life, the sheer cinematic ecstasy of watching unfold something so assured and fully realized, Samuel L. Jackson's Mister Senior Love Daddy, and a peripatetic Greek chorus, among others - are equaled only by the fiery injustice it bears witness to in an apocalyptic third act. A pizza shop, a town drunk, a classic car, a racist son, a boom box, a wall of fame, and a trash can are like additional characters in this glorious pastiche of a society trying to come to terms with itself. Lee's didactic, sometimes problematic gadflyism (no film ever went so quickly south for me as the final sequences of his Malcolm X) is channeled through his characters to profound effect, echoing the conflict within every person whose ever experienced a moral struggle while heartbreakingly examining the ways our individual bad habits and shortsightedness perpetuate the larger failings of society. The movie wants to shake you up, and whether or not you warm up to it may depend on how necessary you find its sporadically rude tone to be. Arguably perfect from the first utterly organic beat to the last, chances are it will change you, and for the better.