25th Hour — IQ Score 164/200

Spike Lee's 2002 Edward Norton-anchored film — the first major American film to directly confront post-9/11 New York. The structural commitment to letting the protagonist's final 24 hours before federal prison be the actual subject — and the Ground Zero monologue sequence — establish the film's canonical position in the post-attack American-cinema canon.

Among Lee's most carefully-constructed character studies.