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AFI (2007) • AFI-096

Do the Right Thing

1989 • Spike Lee
Do the Right Thing poster
AVAILABLE EDITIONS
ABOUT THIS FILM
RUNTIME
120 min
FAMOUS QUOTE
“Fight the power!”

Spike Lee’s vibrant and provocative drama unfolds over the course of a sweltering summer day in a Brooklyn neighborhood, where ordinary routines gradually give way to rising tension and open conflict. Through a dense network of residents, customers, friends, and rivals, the film captures a community alive with humor, music, pride, resentment, and unspoken grievance. Lee’s energetic direction and ensemble cast create a street-level portrait of urban life that is at once richly specific and politically explosive. As the heat intensifies, so do the pressures around race, power, and belonging, making Do the Right Thing one of the most urgent and influential American films ever made about community and racial tension.

Why it matters

  • Do the Right Thing reshaped American cinema’s treatment of race by refusing easy moral simplification and showing how systemic tension, personal frustration, and everyday life can collide with devastating force.
  • Spike Lee’s blend of comedy, music, heightened color, direct address, and social realism gave the film a formal energy that influenced generations of filmmakers interested in politically charged storytelling.
  • Its portrait of a neighborhood under pressure remains strikingly relevant, not because it offers neat answers, but because it understands how injustice lives inside ordinary interactions, institutions, and public space.

Watch for

  • How Lee uses color, heat, and camera movement to make the neighborhood feel physically alive and increasingly volatile as the day wears on.
  • The ensemble structure, where even brief encounters and side conversations deepen the film’s sense of community and reveal competing perspectives rather than a single viewpoint.
  • Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” which functions not just as soundtrack but as a recurring force within the world of the film, shaping mood, identity, and confrontation.
  • The tonal shifts between humor, argument, music, and violence, which make the film’s final eruption feel both shocking and tragically inevitable.

Vibe

DramaUrban HeatRacial TensionCommunity PortraitBrooklyn SummerMoral CollisionPolitical FireColor and RhythmStreet-Level AngerSpike Lee Landmark
AFI RANK
1998: —
2007: #96