In Do the Right Thing Lee has progressed beyond tour de force and experiment; he’s succeeded in wedding subject and form in an aesthetic whole.

| Apr 1, 2025

Spike, baby, you're beautiful when you're angry.

| Mar 21, 2025

..."Do the Right Thing" is like a prism: You beam your own hot glare of racial animosity onto it, and it refracts it into a rainbow spray of understanding. It tells you why you hate, which may be the way to stop hating.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 21, 2025

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing is the most poignant, disturbing and frighteningly real film about race relations ever made by a black American film maker.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 21, 2025

As the ugliness of racism flares up in our own backyard, Do the Right Thing couldn't be more timely. It begs for understanding with a bracing freshness and compassion.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 21, 2025

Tightly wound, crammed with eccentric characters and written as a brilliant blend of detail and ambiguity, "Do the Right Thing: establishes Spike Lee as a major American film maker.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 21, 2025

Nothing has captured the current mood of hip-hop - a mixture of exuberance and militant anger -as perfectly as Do the Right Thing...

| Mar 21, 2025

[Do the Right Thing] uses its abundant energy simply to knock down bridges that have been built and raise the wall of the ghetto mentality a row or two higher.

| Mar 21, 2025

...Do the Right Thing is a welcome return to Spike Lee's best form after the disappointment of School Daze...

| Mar 21, 2025

...[Do the right Thing] is a bold, original and deceptively well-constructed piece of work.

| Mar 20, 2025

The strengths of Do the Right Thing lie firstly in its stylishness - its brash energy, its bright, primary palette, its technical virtuosity...and, secondly, in Lee's moral generosity.

| Mar 20, 2025

As soon as the credit sequence gets moving...you sense that Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing is going to be an extraordinary film.

| Mar 20, 2025

Most of the way through this funny, touching, ultimately heartbreaking movie, some of [the racial stereotype escapes] actually succeed. That, in itself, is remarkable, and shows that Lee's vision is ultimately a cautiously hopeful one.

| Mar 20, 2025

Spike may have thought he was doing the right thing...But this movie makes a wrong turn on the way to greatness, coming up with a big mind and sense-numbing blur in the place its soul was when it started.

| Mar 20, 2025

In terms of visceral force, the movie works. As an artistic expression of chaos, or even as a treatise, it fails, wretchedly.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 20, 2025

In a summer of escapism, Spike Lee has the audacity to challenge movie audiences to think. How refreshing.

| Mar 20, 2025

It's a cozy film but not necessarily a comfortable movie to watch. It is equally joyful and sorrowful and sometimes, somehow, at the same time.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 20, 2025

...Lee has never been very interested in answers; it's the questions that obsess him. Do the Right Thing, his best film thus far, is a perfect example of his searching nature...

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 20, 2025

..."Do the Right Thing" does more to tap the collective experience of black America than any documentary or movie I've ever seen. It's an impressive look at the "Other America,"...

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 20, 2025

[Spike Lee is] tightening his grip this time on the subject of racism and squeeing harder. And eyeing his target through smoke-colored sunshades.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 20, 2025