The kind of intelligent entertainment that has not been Hollywood’s specialty for the past 40 years makes a comeback in the directorial hands of Spike Lee. Confounding all the expectations that could be formed for a movie in which, as a press release put it, “a tough cop, Detective Frazier (Denzel Washington), matches wits with a clever bank robber, Dalton (Clive Owen), in a tense hostage drama,” Inside Man is neither a formula commercial project nor the kind of cynical exercise that comes to life only in marginal winks and flashes. Lee and screenwriter Russell Gewirtz have made a film in which pleasures, tensions, and calculations that would be peripheral (at best) in a standard heist movie become central. And though some reviewers have claimed to find Lee at his most impersonal here, this is, I think, a genre film of the best kind, in which the personal style of the filmmaker functions with peak conviction, audacity, and assurance. The only thing missing is the hammering stridency that has marred even Lee’s best joints.

The plot is clever enough, and Lee pays it just the right measure of respect by playing it from the points of view of professionals for whom twists and turns are normal business: Washington’s smooth hostage negotiator, Owen’s calm and ambiguous criminal strategist, and an angular fixer (Jodie Foster) who descends on the crisis in order to retrieve the safe-deposit box that proves to be the heisters’ main object. Lee’s masterstroke is to treat the plot as a pretext for an alluring and absorbing interplay of attitudes. This interplay becomes epic, in his typical manner, by taking in differences of race, gender, power, and language. As hyper–New York as anything he’s done, Inside Man works as a complicated street dialogue in which people improvise their way through one confrontation after another, glad of opportunities to deploy their wit and their private obsessions.