Inside Man See's Spike Lee Excelling In The Confines of A Hostage Thriller

Spike Lee has done a lot in his distinguished filmmaking career, but in 2006, twenty years after his first directorial effort was released, he got to try out helming a mid-budget Hollywood heist movie for the first time. Easily the most expensive and commercial endeavor of his career, the feature would end up being Inside Man, and thankfully, Lee wouldn't be sacrificing his own unique traits as an artist to make this motion picture. For instance, though he's not credited with the screenplay penned solely by Russell Gerwitz, a lot of traits in the Inside Man script, namely an emphasis on extensive dialogue, feel akin to what one might find in a typical Lee screenplay. This project certainly feels like it's been fitted for Lee's sensibilities and that results in an extremely entertaining heist thriller.

Thank You For Smoking Squanders Its Potential On Derivative Storytelling

Juno was the movie that took director Jason Reitman to a whole new level of fame, but it wasn't his very first foray into the world of feature-length movies. After directing a large number of short films, Reitman made his inaugural foray into this type of directing with Thank You For Smoking, a political satire that establishes the kind of character-informed dark comedy that would be omnipresent in his subsequent works. Unfortunately, the kind of quality that would be found in Reitman's next three features is nowhere near as prominent in Thank You For Smoking, which is a more erratic and frequently frustrating type of Jason Reitman movie.