The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
37. 1989 - Do The Right Thing
Honourable Mentions: Glory, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Killer
Although he marked his full feature debut a few years prior with She's Gotta Have It, 1989 marked the major emergence of Spike Lee as a force in American cinema, with Lee bringing seminal comedy drama Do the Right Thing to cinemas and making the words "a Spike Lee joint" something everyone had to pay attention to going forward.
Lee's uncompromising approach to political subject matter - which is often times devastating, defiant, and empowering all at once - was fully formed with Do the Right Thing, which dwelled on racial conflict and tensions in a New York neighbourhood during a scorching summer and featured Lee in an iconic acting performance alongside Giancarlo Esposito, Danny Aiello and John Turturro, among many other considerable talents.
Alongside the masterpiece biopic Malcolm X, which released a few years later in 1992, Do the Right Thing remains Lee's most essential film - a searing deconstruction of America's racial politics, love, hate and community, built with a generational depth of feeling.