Inside Man

A masked group enters a Manhattan bank in broad daylight, seizes control of the building and takes the customers and staff inside as hostages. Detective Keith Frazier, already under scrutiny over corruption allegations from within his own department, is assigned to handle the negotiations with the robbers, whose leader, Dalton Russell, appears to have prepared for every possible response. As the standoff drags on, a lawyer named Madeleine White is brought in at the urging of the bank's influential owner, and her presence complicates an already fragile situation.

Spike Lee directed the film from a screenplay by Russell Gewirtz, with Brian Grazer producing. It is the fifteenth of the twenty-six films Lee has directed, arriving between She Hate Me and All the Invisible Children. Denzel Washington plays Frazier, Clive Owen plays Russell, and Jodie Foster plays White, with Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe and Chiwetel Ejiofor among the supporting cast; sixty-seven performers and 125 crew members are credited.

Released in March 2006, the crime drama runs 129 minutes and was made for about 45 million dollars, going on to take roughly 184 million worldwide. Responses have been consistently favourable across sources: it holds 7.6 on IMDb from more than 423,000 votes, 7.4 on TMDB from a much smaller base of around 6,500, and a critics' rating of 7.5 from 209 reviews, placing professional and audience assessments closely in line with one another.