Spike Lee goes Inside

Via Jeffrey Overstreet, Emanuel Levy is calling the upcoming Spike Lee/Denzel Washington thriller, The Inside Man “nothing short of brilliant.”

As of March, it's the best film of 2006. It's also the best film Lee has made in his twenty-year career. I'll review the film at length next week, but for now, the best compliment I can pay Lee and Inside Man is to say that both the master of suspense Hitchcock and prince of New York City police dramas Sidney Lumet would be proud of his work.

Now, I’m a huge fan of Lumet (a director about whom I may have more to say about soon), so those are strong words to my ears. More importantly, I even really like Spike Lee, despite all his personal issues. Even when his films are bad—and there are quite a few that are—they’re always worth watching. When his films are good (I’m thinking Clockers and the wholly underrated 25^th Hour here), or even when short moments in his bad films are good (She Hate Me, awful as it was, had a few sequences of pure genius), they’re revelatory. So if Inside Man, which had a surprisingly taught trailer and sports a fantastic cast, surpasses the best of his work, then March 24 is a date to watch.