A Sexy Blog

From its first, brash wink at the audience—Clive Owen, all gallows cool, staring right through the screen and telling us, with devilish confidence, how he will commit the “perfect robbery”—Spike Lee’s “Inside Man” broadcasts what so many lesser heist films merely whimper: this one is playing a totally different game. What Lee is pulling off here, working with Russell Gewirtz’s Rube Goldberg screenplay (which, for once, doesn’t collapse under its own cleverness), is a kind of conjurer’s trick—not just a “how did they do it?” but a “what are they doing, and why?” And, miraculously, by the end you might just feel like an accomplice, too.

There’s the art of magic, and then there’s the art of the movies — and sometimes, as in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, you get the blessed, fizzing collision: a celluloid conjuring act so elegantly constructed, you half expect the film canisters to vanish into a swirl of sepia smoke. Here, the camera purrs through the gaslit wunderkammer of 19th-century Vienna, and history itself is spun into a stylish web of intrigue, murder, and—naturally—a little heartbreak. We’re so used to historical dramas treating events as window-dressing or, worse, solemn ballast, that it's a small miracle when a film like this one uses the sweep of real history—the Mayerling incident, no less—as a vital pulse beneath its rolling sleeves and hidden doves.