Inside Man: ****

I love Spike Lee, but sometimes his movies can get a little preachy. Sometimes the point overwhelms the story. (Hey, at least he has a point.)

This never happens with Inside Man. It's an old-fashioned heist movie. Lee manages the delicate dance between bank robber Clive Owen and cop Denzel Washington so deftly that we want them both to succeed. The mystery unravels so carefully that you don't even know there is a mystery until you're halfway through.

A lot of the best scenes are throwaways of New Yorkers being New Yorkers. Bickering about other possible solutions to a puzzle they already solved. Swapping parking ticket fixes for translation services. Details.

We're a full three months into 2006, and this is the first good movie I've seen this year. (But tomorrow I'm hoping to see Slither.)

Filed Thu - March 30, 2006, 07:50 AM in

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