Classics of the New Millennium: "Inside Man" (2006) with Wesley Morris

So, first off, I have to apologize: It’s Friday and I don’t have the usual What to Watch line-up telling subscribers about good movies in theaters or on VOD. What can I say? I had a busy week in dinosaur media: An appearance on NPR’s “Here and Now” to talk with host Robin Young about gifted child actors who grow up into good, not-insane adult actors, and two pieces for the Washington Post: An appreciation of the late, great Robbie Robertson that runs today (free link is here) and a 45th-anniversary celebration (sort of) of “National Lampoon’s Animal House” that will go up next week.

Anyway, it’s August and new-release pickings are traditionally slim during the dog days. Of movies opening in theaters and on demand today, I look forward to catching up with “Jules,” featuring Ben Kingsley and an alien, the cheeky British hair-salon horror movie “Medusa Deluxe” (in theaters and streaming), and “Red, White, and Royal Blue,” an Amazon Prime rom-com about a feud-turned-love affair between the President’s son and Britain’s (fictional) Prince Henry that sounds and apparently is so ridiculous as to be reasonably good fun.

If you’re still thinking deep thoughts about “Oppenheimer,” allow me to recommend Justin Chang’s excellent think-piece in the L.A. Times peeling apart the movie’s moral layers of representation and non-representation (free link is here).

Until next week, though, you’ll just have to make do with the latest podcast in the Watch List’s Classics of the New Millennium series, this one reuniting me with my good friend and Boston Globe work-BFF from 2002 to 2013, New York Times critic-at-large (and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner) Wesley Morris. When asked which movie he’d like to discuss, Wesley went straight to Spike Lee’s 2006 heist movie “Inside Man,” which stars Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, and Willem Dafoe, among others, and which prompted a lively discussion on genre, casting, and all things Spike. Have a listen up top or watch the video version below; the movie itself can be had as a cheap rental on all the usual streaming suspects should you want to watch or re-watch it ahead of time, which I recommend you do, because there are spoilers galore when Wesley and I get going. Man, I miss this guy.

Thanks for listening! Have any thoughts? Want to suggest a movie for this series? Don’t hesitate to weigh in.

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