Spike Lee is one of America's great filmmakers, yet his work is often underrated, which is a shame. Lee has worked in many genres, from his acclaimed 1989 film Do The Right Thing to 2002's 25th Hour, Lee has a large body of unique work.

His latest, Inside Man, is, at first glance, a traditional crime thriller. A group of bank robbers, led by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), and three accomplices, rob — or seem to rob — a Manhattan bank. They do so in the usual way, barking orders, ordering everyone in the bank on the ground, threatening to kill anyone who moves. But this group of robbers seems to have an entirely different agenda in mind, and they seem to have plotted the perfect robbery. With electronic equipment they knock out the bank's surveillance camera, and have all the hostages change into the same outfit the robbers are wearing.

Spike Lee frames the action with a non-linear narrative, so in one scene we'll watch Det. Frazier speak with Dalton Russell, and in another we flash ahead to the hostages being interrogated, as the detectives try to find out who pulled off what ends up being a non-robbery, or move to the present to receive important (or so it seems) information from one of the main characters.

The police bring in Det. Keith Frazier (the always excellent Denzel Washington), the hostage negotiator, to deal with the situation. He and Dalton Russell begin a cat-and-mouse game of trying to figure out what each other is up to. As time goes by, Frazier is convinced that there's something else going on, and it's not a bank robbery. Frazier is taken off the case, of course, and is left to figure out what the hell is going on. I'll not spoil the ending, but there is a Usual Suspects-like moment when Frazier realizes a key clue to the crime, although at that point it's too late to do anything about it.