The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

37. 1989 - Do The Right Thing

Do The Right Thing
Universal Pictures

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.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.