The only riots that Do the Right Thing caused were among the critics, who, along with worried politicians, effectively masked the film-in-itself in smoke. It's time to take another look, as Village Voice critic J. Hoberman did: "Let's start by observing that the experience of this movie is complicated and perhaps chastening, but also skillfully organized and not exactly unpleasurable. Do the Right Thing is bright and brazen, and it moves with a distinctive jangling glide. Set on a single block in the heart of Brooklyn on the hottest Saturday of the summer, it offers the funniest, most stylized, most visceral New York street scene this side of Scorseseland. Lee is a deft quick-sketch artist. His Bed-Stuy block...is as humid as a terrarium and as teeming with life...A daring mix of naturalism and allegory, agitprop and psychodrama, Do the Right Thing begins, literally, where School Daze leaves off-with a Brechtian call to `wake up'-and, as confrontational as it is, the movie sustains more moment-to-moment interest than most of the year's releases combined. The choppy, fragmented narrative seems much smoother on second viewing, once you get the spiral structure...The ending of Do the Right Thing is certainly upsetting (and upsettingly incoherent), but its pathos and self-defeat are real."