The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

Ryder (John Travolta) leads a group of armed men, board a New York subway train and takes everyone in a coach hostage. Their demands : 10 million dollars within sixty minutes or a passenger will be killed every minute after that.

MTA dispatcher Walter Garber (Denzel Washington) becomes the unwitting negotiator. When Ryder demonstrates his seriousness by killing some of the hostages, the money has to be delivered to him as he demands and Garber must do whatever he can to end the situation, but it seems the hijackers have a perfect escape plan.

The Great Debaters (2007)

This movie is based on a true story about the struggles of a debate coach, Melvin Tolson ,(Denzel Washington) of a black college to place his debate team on an equal footing with the white school's.

These attempts put him in direct confrontation with some influential white people including the local sheriff. The black debate team managed to scale this hurdle by sheer tenacity. They won debate after debate until they eventually came face to face with the Harvard Debate team on their own grounds, Harvard University.

American Gangster (2007)

Ellsworth Johnson (Clarence Williams) is a gangster that runs much of Harlem. He dies of a heart attack, but not before imparting much of his discipline, intelligence and wisdom into his driver, Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) who decides to take control of the drug trade.

Lucas begins to bring heroin in from Asia, selling the drugs at half the price and double the quality of that of his competitors. He quietly became a powerful person in the underground criminal community and even controls the local mafia family.

Police detective Richie Roberts (Russel Crowe) is given the task -together with very honest cops like himself- to get to the root of the new drug causing so much havoc in the community. He is given a mandate to get to the supplier. But it is difficult to get Frank Lucas, in fact detective Roberts does not even know of his existence. This is because Lucas keeps an extremely low profile, dresses normally and makes no mistakes.

But a series of events and mistakes bring the police closer and closer to getting their hands on him.