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3. 25th Hour (2002)
In the 25 years since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, many movies have tried to capture that surreal moment of fear and fragile community. None have done it better than the first proper post-9/11 movie, 25th Hour. Although the film only occasionally references the attacks, having already been in pre-production on Sept. 11, it displays a self-destructive nation full of anger against itself, which refuses to accept its diversity, even as it realizes that diversity has always been a part of it.
Based on the novel by David Benioff, who wrote the screenplay and would later be half of Game of Thrones showrunning duo, 25th Hour stars Edward Norton as small-time drug dealer Monty Brogan. Busted for possession, Monty has one last day before he must report to prison, which he chooses to spend with his girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), and his best friends Frank (Barry Pepper), an aggressive stock trader, and Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a private school English teacher. As he considers leaving the city for good, or spending the next seven years in Hell, Monty must face everything he loves and hates about America in general and New York City in particular, culminating a visceral monologue that is among the best scenes in Lee’s career.
2. Malcolm X (1992)
Only Spike Lee could make a Hollywood biopic about Malcom X. That was especially true in 1992 when most of America still found his message too painful to consider. Yet Lee had not only the sway to get Warner Bros. to fund the picture (often by forcing the studio’s hand, following tactics he learned from his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola), but had the vision to ensure that the picture was faithful Malcolm X’s story. Moreover, only Lee had the filmmaking chops to turn the life of Malcom X into an epic and, it must be said, entertaining movie.
Of course, it helps that Lee had his greatest collaborator Denzel Washington in the lead, an actor capable of moving past the icon to find the human being. Co-written by Lee and Arnold Perl, themselves following The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, the film traces Malcom Little’s days as a hustler living in Boston during World War II to his conversion to Islam after meeting Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.) to becoming the Civil Rights leader we know today. Despite coming in at more than three and a half hours, Malcom X plays like old-school Hollywood spectacle without sacrificing any of the power of the man’s message.
1. Do the Right Thing (1989)
Spike Lee has never stopped innovating and experimenting. Still, there’s no denying that one of his earliest movies remains his greatest: 1989’s Do the Right Thing. The story of tensions breaking in a Brooklyn neighborhood during an extremely hot day, Do the Right Thing demonstrates everything great about Lee as a filmmaker: his formal restlessness, his love of classic Hollywood, his fearless depiction of American racism, and his interest in communal life.
Lee takes the starring role as Mookie, a young man who supports the son he has with his girlfiend Tina (Rosie Perez) by delivering pizzas for Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello). As Mookie makes his deliveries and deals with the heat, always serenaded by the records played by the all-seeing DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson), he encounters all manner of citizen, including the high-strung Buggin’ Out (Esposito), Sal’s racist son Pino (John Turturro), the mysterious Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), and older on again/ff again couple Mother Sister (Ruby Dee) and Da Mayor (Davis). Lee draws the characters with such love that the movie’s explosion of violence at the end still feels inevitable, heartbreaking, and necessary, all these years later.
