Netflix brings one of the most important films ever to your home

Netflix announced 12 new titles for the first of the month and then added a dozen more to the mix. The stealth release slate was at least as good as the previously announced group. Happily, it included one of my favorite films ever. If you haven't seen it yet, this is your chance to add it to your list.

I saw this movie at the theater when it came out in 1989. It was astonishing, amazing, and absolutely brilliant. Sounds like an especially arrogant LLC, doesn't it? Well, it truly was and still is all of those things. From the opening frame to the last, I was riveted, as was the entire audience. As soon as it was available on DVD, I had my own copy. That was followed by the Blu-ray, then the digital version. And lucky you, you get to watch it now on Netflix.

When I say this is the best film from one of our most influential filmmakers, it isn't just my opinion. It scored 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and an astronomically great 93 on Metacritic. Critics as renowned as Gene Siskel and Vincent Canby couldn't stop praising it. This is from the director who also gave us She's Gotta Have It, He Got Game, Malcolm X, and BlacKkKlansman. Even 36 years later, nothing matches the greatness of this film.

Netflix adds the brilliant Do the Right Thing in March

Hands down, Do the Right Thing was the best film of 1989. Yes, this was the year of Drugstore Cowboy, Heathers, Crimes and Misdemeanors, My Left Foot, Dead Poets Society, and Field of Dreams, among other all-time greats. This was also the year that the badly aged Driving Miss Daisy inexplicably won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Thankfully, we didn't see another egregious bit of nonsense like that on Sunday evening.

Unlike Miss Daisy or the overrated Green Book, Lee's film is an honest examination of racial relations and tensions. There are no lazily-written cartoonish racists, no over-the-top Angry Young Black Men. Each character, no matter how few lines they have in the film, is true. The conflicts between the Italian-American pizzeria owner Sal and his son Pino and his largely Black clientele, led by Buggin' Out and Radio Raheem, drive the story. The tension is hotter than the heat on the Brooklyn sidewalks.

Lee himself is great as the central figure, pizza delivery guy Mookie, but he's nearly overshadowed by - well, nearly everyone. Danny Aiello, Samuel L. Jackson, John Turturro, Bill Nunn, Rosie Perez, and John Savage are all standouts. Lee's sister, Joie Lee, is criminally underrated as one of the voices of reason, Mookie's sister Jade.

Giancarlo Esposito already had over a dozen film credits at this point, including Lee's School Daze, but this was his star turn. And no one was more powerful than one of Hollywood's true power couples, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.

I haven't even touched on the genius of the hilarious Geek chorus of Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison, and Robin Harris. There isn't a false note anywhere in this film. Speaking of notes, the movie explodes with Public Enemy's classic anthem Fight the Power, commissioned by Lee for the film. The film concludes with more fire and fury and no easy answers.

There are no easy answers to racism or cultural wars. Not in America, or anywhere else in the world. That honesty is just one reason that Do the Right Thing is one of my favorite films ever.

The movie is honest and refuses to take sides. I'm just a movie fan, like you. But you can take the word of the great film critic Roger Ebert, who said he had few experiences in his life like his first viewing of the film. To quote, "Most movies remain up there on the screen. Only a few penetrate your soul. In May of 1989, I walked out of the screening at the Cannes Film Festival with tears in my eyes. Spike Lee had done an almost impossible thing. He’d made a movie about race in America that empathized with all the participants."

As Kim Basinger said when announcing the five nominees for best film that year, “We’ve got five great films here, and they’re great for one reason: They tell the truth. But there is one film missing from this list that deserves to be on it because, ironically, it might tell the biggest truth of all. And that’s ‘Do The Right Thing.'” Now it's your turn; whenever and however you can: do the right thing.

More Netflix news and analysis: