Conducted every 10 years, the Sight & Sound Best Movies of All Time poll is voted on by film critics, writers, professors and other experts in the field of cinema. A concurrent poll is open only to directors, and their results often vary wildly from the main poll. The Cosford Cinema will be showcasing ten selections from the filmmakers’ list every Sunday over the summer from June 4-August 13.

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) | DIRECTOR: Spike Lee | WITH: Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, Spike Lee, Bill Nunn, Richard Edson, John Turturro, Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie Perez. RUNNING TIME: 2H | RATED R for vulgar language, brief violence, adult themes. | 4K DIGITAL PROJECTION

Set on one block of Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy Do or Die neighborhood, at the height of summer, this masterpiece by Spike Lee, which ranked 29th in the directors’ poll, confirmed him as a writer and filmmaker of peerless vision and passionate social engagement. Over the course of a single day, the easygoing interactions of a cast of unforgettable characters—Da Mayor, Mother Sister, Mister Señor Love Daddy, Tina, Sweet Dick Willie, Buggin Out, Radio Raheem, Sal, Pino, Vito, and Lee’s Mookie among them—give way to heated confrontations as tensions rise along racial fault lines, ultimately exploding into violence.

Punctuated by the anthemic refrain of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” Do the Right Thing is a landmark in American cinema, as politically and emotionally charged and as relevant now as when it first hit the big screen.

"In the small and finely scrutinized world of Do the Right Thing, everything’s more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be. Humanizing difficulty stretches out in each direction, makes a summer day feel like a fraught year. Although his story is always rolling toward tragedy—blood and the billy club, fire and water—much of Lee’s art here, and his deception, comes from how he lingers on little episodes, and on the people who populate them.

"As if introducing us to each child of a bustling family, he brings forward a face or two at a time and chides them into offering us a wave. Here’s Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), the drunken neighborhood warden; here’s Mother Sister (Ruby Dee, doing a haikuist’s unwasteful work with her few lines)—whose name is all relationship, implicitly connected on both ends—watching from the window; here’s a salty triumvirate of older men, sitting outside, backgrounded by a fire-engine-red wall, talking shit and trading complaints.

"Lee’s great talents are already brilliantly present here, in this third feature: effusive place-love and a visual style that makes his best characters individual and iconic at once. His people talk bombastically but with surprising vulnerability; Lee’s writing drips with offhand wit and streetwise poetry. And his humane visual style, full of humming color and plain interpersonal curiosity, is an honorific engine.

"In Do the Right Thing, this ethic is compounded by Ernest Dickerson’s photography, with its emphasis on symmetry and synchronized motion; the vivid, color-clashing outfits arranged by costume designer Ruth E. Carter; and Wynn Thomas’s production design, which turns Bed-Stuy into a haunted, waiting stage. The saint-making impulse that led to Lee’s famous floating-walk effect—first seen in Mo’ Better Blues (1990) though absent from Do the Right Thing—is a twin to the one that gives us that loving early glimpse, a brief portrait, of poor Raheem. -- Vinson Cunningham

Admission is $5 and tickets available at link above. UM students with Cane Card use code UMSTUDENT