at an all-black college in the South. Lee'sDo the Right Thing (1989) follows a day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn on the hottest day of the summer. Racial tensions rise, culminating in the murder of a young African-American man by the police and the burning of a local pizzeria. In Mo' Better Blues (1990), Lee explores the world of a jazz musician and the conflicts between his creative life and his love life. Lee's next project, Jungle Fever (1991), centers on an interracial affair between an African-American architect and his Italian-American secretary. The relationship is met with scorn and violence from the families and members of the neighborhood. "Jungle fever" describes the phenomenon of sexual attraction between the races based on sexual myths, and the film explores this aspect of interracial relationships as opposed to relationships based on love and culminating in marriage. Malcolm X (1992) was one of Lee's most ambitious projects and covers the life of African-American activist Malcolm X. Crooklyn (1994) is a semi-autobiographical movie that Lee wrote with his sister and brother. The story follows a few months in the life of a family in the 1970s. The Carmichael family lives in Brooklyn; the father is a musician, the mother a teacher. The film is told from the perspective of the 10-year-old daughter and follows her as she deals with the death of her mother and her journey to adulthood. In Clockers (1995) Lee tells the story of an African-American teenager who becomes a drug dealer. The character is able to rationalize his decision to deal crack until he sees the murder and black-on-black violence that drugs bring about. With Girl 6 (1996) Lee returned to a female protagonist. The heroine is an actress who becomes disenchanted when a director asks her to take her top off during a reading. She turns to the phone sex business to make a living and is quite successful. When a sadistic customer reveals that he knows where she lives, Girl 6 decides to leave the business, move to California, and resume her acting career. The film closes as it began, with a director asking her to take off her top, but this time she calmly finishes her monologue and leaves.

Critical Reception

Critics who review Lee's work often digress into discussions of Lee's persona in addition to or instead of his films. Some assert that Lee is a keen commentator on contemporary society and a cinematic innovator. Others describe him as an untalented commercial sellout. Lee is typically criticized for his lack of technical virtuosity. Reviewers point to his use of a moving screen behind two still characters to make them appear to be walking as a sign of his amateurish preoccupation with cinematic gadgetry. Feminists often complain about Lee's portrayal of women. bell hooks states that "Like many females in Lee's audience, I have found his representation of women in general, and black women in particular, to be consistently stereotypical and one-dimensional." The female protagonist of She's Gotta Have It came closest to a portrait of a modern, independent woman, but critics assert that the rape scene subverted the character Lee had created. Reviewers point to Nola's rape as a punishment for her sexual independence, and the scene has caused many reviewers to accuse Lee of sexism and misogyny. Lee is sometimes compared to Woody Allen because New York City plays such a pivotal role in both directors' films and both directors act in their own movies. Lee resists the comparison, however, citing the lack of African Americans in Allen's films as an unrealistic portrayal of the racial makeup of New York. Some reviewers complain that Lee's work is superficial and that his plots lack focus. Bert Cardullo, writing in The Hudson Review, asserts that Lee "prefers to do the easier thing: cram his film with incident rather than exploration, with texture rather than subtext." Most critics mention the ambiguity in Lee's films, including the question of what the right thing is in his Do the Right Thing. Reviewers are divided on the success of the ambiguity. Some praise Lee for refusing to give his audience simple Hollywood answers, while others complain that his films are unstructured with unfocused plots. Despite the controversy surrounding the filmmaker, most critics agree that Lee's portrayal of the everyday lives of African Americans is new and refreshing, and his success will make it possible for other African-American directors to make further contributions.