The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The hottest day of the summer on one block of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. A neighborhood pizzeria run by an Italian-American family, a gentrifying block, a wall of photos that someone wants changed, and a heat wave that wears everyone's patience thin until a police killing sets the block alight.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the refusal: Spike Lee ends the film by quoting both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X back to back and declines to tell you which one is right, or whether the climactic act counts as the right thing at all. The pedagogy follows from that. Every character gets a real argument, so the film works as a discussion engine instead of a lecture, and it shows how everyday friction (a wall of photos, a boombox, a bike scuffed by a sneaker) builds toward something state violence then ignites. It has also drawn real critique over how it handles its women and its Korean grocers, so watch it as a contested argument, not a verdict.

A documentary on the September 1971 uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in New York, when about 1,300 incarcerated men took over the prison to demand basic rights, and the state's assault that ended it killed 39 men, prisoners and hostages alike. Built from archival footage and testimony from survivors. It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Why it’s here: The film puts the people who lived it back in charge of the story, and the story is how a state answers a list of demands. What's punk is the demands themselves: showers, food, medical care, the right to be treated as human. What's pedagogical is the aftermath, the gap between what officials said happened and what survivors and records show. It's a lesson in how to read an official account.