20 years ago, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington teamed up for a perfect crime thriller

Before they worked together on Inside Man, Denzel Washington had appeared in three previous Spike Lee movies. But Lee had never really directed a Denzel Washington movie, in part because that designation didn’t exist back in the early 1990s when they made Mo’ Better Blues and Malcolm X. Though Washington is an ultra-charismatic movie star, those projects with Lee weren’t principally vehicles for that charisma. They placed more emphasis on Lee’s vision — and on Washington’s top-tier versatility and complexity as a performer.