8. He Got Game (1998)

Denzel Washington gives a strong performance as a convicted wife murderer who is released from prison for a week on orders from the governor. The goal? To see if Washington can persuade his son to enroll at the governor’s alma mater so he can play for the basketball team. NBA star Ray Allen, who plays the son, is almost impressive in his acting debut. But neither of them can do much to change the fact that the movie is ridiculously overlong at two hours, fifteen minutes, or the fact that the plot sounds like an idea for a comedy that went terribly, terribly wrong.

7. Crooklyn (1994)

Lee’s follow-up to Malcolm X was this uncharacteristically mild-mannered, autobiographical film about growing up in the Beford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn in the early 1970s. (Though it must be said that Lee didn't grow up in Bed-Stuy — his family lived in what Rosie Perez called "artsy-fartsy Fort Greene.") His sweetest film, it’s a casual tribute to his family (represented here by Alfre Woodard, Delroy Lindo, and, as the little girl through whose eyes we see most of the action, ten-year-old Zelda Harris), though it may be most deeply felt as a tribute to the music of the era, lovingly compiled on the soundtrack.

6. Clockers (1995)

Lee’s adaptation of Richard Price’s novel about drug dealing in a Brooklyn housing project was co-produced by Martin Scorsese, who was even kind enough to lend Harvey Keitel as a more-or-less sympathetic cop. The cast also includes the young Mekhi Phifer, in his movie debut, as a dealer caught between the cops and his increasingly dangerous boss (Delroy Lindo), and forced to choose between sticking to a life with no future and the terror of disappearing into the unknown. Ambitious and well-made, but the material was a little too familiar when it came out, and that was before The Wire came along to kick its ass.

5. 25th Hour (2002)

Lee’s whitest movie, starring Edward Norton as a soulful Irish-American drug dealer on his way to serving a seven-year prison stretch, transformed itself into an elegy for the damaged city when the Twin Towers fell during pre-production. A sad, scuffed-up, and painful film with beautiful performances from a cast that also includes Brian Cox, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rosario Dawson, and Anna Paquin. It also features two of Lee's most memorable montages: the "Fuck you" sequence in which Norton's character lays down a litany of racist complaints to a mirror, and the film's closing sequence.

4. She’s Gotta Have It (1986)

Lee’s (mostly black-and-white) sex comedy remains a model for turning the budgetary limitations and lack of resources of indie filmmaking into an asset, a source of ingenuity, and a chance to put things onscreen that never made it there before. In the process, he not only made his name synonymous with cutting-edge filmmaking (and his face and voice a valuable property for commercial licensing) but turned Brooklyn into a trendy piece of real estate, as well as the setting for a thousand op-ed pieces on the new Black Renaissance.

3. Inside Man (2006)

After seeming indifference to his box office reputation for years, Lee surprised everyone with this breezy, confident popcorn feature, which may be the best time any New York filmmaker has had in a bank since Dog Day Afternoon. Denzel Washington’s harried-but-charming Mr. Smooth role here might be Lee’s thank-you gift to the actor, after all the heavy lifting he’d been required to perform in their previous collaborations.

2. Malcolm X (1992)

If you take Lee and his work according to the terms he’s set down, this three-hour-and-twenty-minute biopic, starring Denzel Washington and featuring cameos by Nelson Mandela, Bobby Seale, and Al Sharpton, has to go near the top of any list of his work, if only for its size and the scale of its accomplishment. Said accomplishments include making a public issue of whether any other director would be allowed to make the movie and gathering contributions from celebrity donors to finish the film when the studio refused to further extend the budget during post-production. The finest of his many collaborations with Denzel Washington.

1. Do the Right Thing (1989)

Whatever else Lee does, odds are really good that this will still be the first thing mentioned in his obituaries. It captures how it feels to be alienated and angry on a very hot day in New York at a time when the city’s inhabitants’ capacity for getting along seemed to be at an all-time low, and it also captures — recklessly, excitingly — how it feels to have a camera at your command, the energy of the streets rising to meet you, and an intense desire to have your say. Some critics made fools of themselves at the time by warning that it might inspire outbreaks of violence at theaters. As if to maintain a natural balance, Lee made a royal ass of himself by having a fit when somebody else’s movie (sex, lies, and videotape, as it happens) won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival.