Friday, October 17th 2025

Do the Right Thing

In DO THE RIGHT THING, director Spike Lee provides a raw, unblinking dissection of American racial politics at the close of the 1980s, with Reagan’s America, and its avowedly white supremacist ideology, at the peak of its power. On a blistering hot day in the majority-black Bedford–Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, racial tensions reach a boiling point when members of the African-American community insist that pizza-owner and Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello), as well as his virulently racist son Pino (John Turturro), do more to honour Black celebrities on the walls of their pizzeria, which feature only photos of famous Italian Americans. As the confrontation escalates, long-simmering racial grudges erupt into deadly violence. Lee reaches back to his own experience as a black native of New York as well to his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema to create a film with both deep substance and arresting style. With its incendiary take on the fraught state of American race relations, DO THE RIGHT THING remains as relevant and urgent as ever.