10 Perfect Movies For The Summer

6. Do The Right Thing

If there's one movie which captures the feeling of a sweltering summer's day better than most, it's Spike Lee's seminal comedy-drama Do The Right Thing. It's a film in which that lethargic feeling, slowly transforming into a restless kind of energy pours from every saturated frame. The feeling that things are heating up to boiling point in Do The Right Thing isn't entirely down to the searing sun - this is New York in the late 1980s, a time when racial tensions could ignite over the simplest of things. Indeed, the absence of black cultural figures on the "Wall Of Fame" in an Italian pizzeria is the subject of the altercation at the film's beginning which will prove to encapsulate the fragility of the community as the film reaches its conclusion. New York is often described as a melting pot, and Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing is perhaps the cinematic personification of this description, smart enough to know that depicting the diversity in all its richness beats moralising one way or another any day of the week.
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Contributor

Andrew Dilks hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.