Inside Man.

"The heist at the heart of Inside Man is brilliant, and so is the movie," proclaims Scott Foundas right off the top of his review for the LA Weekly. "It's a gripping, jugular entertainment that starts off wound-up and never winds down, and only much later do you realize the movie isn't just playing the audience like a violin, it's also saying something cunning about human nature and the price of success in the big city."

My, how mileage varies. Writing in the City Pages, Michael Atkinson finds the film "irrelevant, another semi-high-tech mega-heist movie, the rhythms and tropes of which we are all as familiar with as we are with the wallpaper facing our toilets.... [H]eist films are hardly what they used to be; for decades, they were a vehicle for postwar desperation and fatalism, and today the genre has an empty tank of frisson to offer without film noir's acknowledgment of doom."

After the jump: Updates through 3/30.

The film earns a B+ from Scott Tobias at the AV Club: "Denzel Washington always does his best work with Lee, and he's charming and in command as the unflappable detective put in charge of an unusual bank robbery attempt."

At Slant, Nick Schager: "Perhaps not Lee's dullest 'joint,' it's nonetheless one of his most sloppily rolled."

Counters Jeffrey Overstreet: "It's a satisfying, intense, and surprisingly laugh-out-loud-funny thriller." And for Cinematical's James Rocchi, it's "one of the most satisfying pieces of grown-up entertainment big Hollywood's given us in a long time."

Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press: "Some of Lee's social tension seems shoehorned in, but the best of it plays like an earthbound answer to Crash's direct-from-1971 racist caterwauling - an accurate rendition of modern urban America's infinite gradations of prejudice, and a true portrait of how such impulses get submerged and redirected so people can get ahead."

Spike Lee is not only one of the more interesting directors around precisely because his track record is so mixed (I can barely abide straight-A filmmakers), but he's also one of those rare celebs who can make an interview almost as engaging to read as his films are to watch (you'll remember Sara Vilkomerson's in the New York Observer). signandsight translates a bit from Hanns-Georg Rodek's interview for Die Welt. Here, Lee talks more about his next feature, written by Budd Schulberg, about the Max Schmeling-Joe Louis face-off: "Schulberg sat in the audience of the second Schmeling/Louis fight in 1938. Terence Howard, who was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Hustle & Flow will play Louis, and Hugh Jackson will play Schmeling. Now I'm working on the financing... It's going to be an epic: Hitler, Goebbels, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Lena Horne. Ever heard of David Lean? I'm telling you: epic. Three hours at least! Bigger than Malcolm X!"

One can imagine that, given Jodie Foster's on-again, off-again efforts to make her Leni Riefenstahl biopic, she and Lee might have had quite a lot to talk about in the run-up to shooting Inside Man. For one thing, both plan to make their films in Berlin.

But that's not all signandsight's got on this one: There's also a translation of Katja Nicodemus's interview with Lee for Die Zeit and, it turns out, that film is really very much on his mind. He asks her who might play Max Schmeling's wife.

Then, via Movie City News, Kaleem Aftab, co-author of Spike Lee: That's My Story and I'm Sticking to It, talks with Lee again for the Times of London.

The Cinemarati who've caught the film open a thread. They've already been discussing one oddity in particular, that Inside Man opens and closes with what Grady Hendrix calls "Dil Se's signature tune, 'Chaiya Chaiya.'"

And here in Germany, it's opened tonight, meaning the German papers have run their reviews. Filmz.de rounds them up.

Reminders: Michael Guillen, Emanuel Levy and, at the Voice, J Hoberman.

Updates, 3/24. "[J]ust as Jimmy Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock brought out the best in each other, Denzel and Spike need each other like vermouth and gin," writes Grady Hendrix at Slate, and further down: "More than anything, [Inside Man] makes the case for Lee as the pre-eminent chronicler of modern-day New York."

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "He has a feel for the city that relatively few other filmmakers do, a knack for capturing not just the things people say to each other and the way they say them, but the way the city seems to be carried - maybe even powered - by the rhythm of their overlapping sentences: That symphony of speech is the city's greatest source of vitality."

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "This is the least overtly personal of Mr Lee's films, but it's also his most polished and satisfying work in years, with none of the raggedness that sometimes mars even his best intentions."

In the Times of London, James Christopher calls the film "a frothy heist movie that hasn't got a single worthy thought in its head."

Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian: "Supremely annoying and nonsensical."

Andy Klein for the LA CityBeat: "[I]t's the sort of commercial thriller that Hollywood thrives on... and a damned good one at that. Lee changes gears with barely a hitch."

Anthony Quinn in the Independent: "It's less Inside Man than Marathon Man, and the disappointment follows you all the way out the cinema."

Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times: A "deft and satisfying entertainment, an elegant, expertly acted puzzler that is just off-base and out-of-the-ordinary enough to keep us consistently involved."

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: "It's not that the movie is hiding something, but that when it's revealed, it's been left sitting too long at room temperature."

Updates, 3/25: Tim Robey writes in the Telegraph that Lee's "righteous anger - the urban discontent that fuels all his best work - isn't snuffed out so much as turned down to simmer away around the film's edges."

Anne Thompson has a theory as to why Lee's career ran into trouble a while back. And she points to reviews from the Washington Post's Stephen Hunter and the Globe and Mail's Rick Groen.

MaryAnn Johanson explains why she considers Inside Man "a lousy lay."

Jeffrey M Anderson: "If any old director-for-hire had made Inside Man it would have been a pretty good thriller. But Spike Lee makes it into something extraordinary.... the best I've seen so far this year."

Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "As much as I think that Spike Lee is one of the most underrated directors around, it would seem that straighter genre films fit his skills more than his usual grab-bags."

Updates, 3/26: Newsweek's David Ansen: "Inside Man, a bank-heist thriller with a tricky, nothing-is-as-it-seems playfulness, is the kind of solid, mass-appeal entertainment that Hollywood is supposed to knock out in its sleep but rarely pulls off even when wide awake."

Chuck Tryon: "While many observers have noted that Inside Man appears to be the 'least personal' film that Lee has made, I'm not sure that's the case... [T]he post 9/11 New York setting is crucial to the film's narrative and provides a basis for the interactions between characters... Perhaps his most compelling critique, however, features Dalton, the author of the heist, registering horror at a nine-year-old boy playing a Grand Theft Auto style video game on a Gameboy featuring disturbing depictions of black-on-black violence."

Chris Barsanti at filmcritic.com: "Inside Man is a film that swaggers."

Update, 3/30: Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly: "As this is his first journey into the vast Hollywood wilderness, it's almost too easy to see Spike Lee himself in the Denzel Washington character, trying to work a crooked system around to his own advantage, hoping he can find a way to do the right thing - but still get paid."

Posted by dwhudson at March 23, 2006 2:35 PM