Inside Man (2006)
Tomatometer: 86%

In which a director most recently known for smaller projects with strong sociopolitical overtones takes over a heist flick for Ron Howard and turns it into one of the biggest hits of the year. It's backfired on him on more than one occasion, but Lee has essentially built a career out of confounding expectations, and he did it again with 2006's Inside Man, taking what could have been a garden-variety thriller and turning it into a smartly subversive take on the whole tired genre. Lee was aided and abetted, of course, by an ace cast led by Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, and Jodie Foster, not to mention Russell Gerwitz's sharp script -- but what really fuels the movie is Lee's direction, which artfully combines both the familiar with the unexpected. Arguably the movie's finest feature is the way Lee takes New York -- a city featured in so many movies that it lost much of its big-screen mojo -- and restores some of the wonderfully messy character it showed in 1970s thrillers like "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three." As Newsweek's David Ansen put it, Inside Man is "A Spike Lee joint that's downright fun."