Lakeview Terrace

Remember a film from the early 90s called Unlawful Entry, with Ray Liotta, Madeleine Stowe, Kurt Russell? A cop terrorizes a suburban couple and there's nothing they can do. Well, Lakeview Terrace, despite a trailer that suggests it's the same, is not the same.
Yes, there are the same elements of a cop from hell that has it in for a couple that's just moved in next door, but under the direction of Neil LaBute Lakeview Terrace has more underlying racial menace, and a bit more psychological depth at least until its typical ending.
Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington are newly married and the new next door neightbors to single father Samuel L. Jackson. Labute makes a point of showing that while Jackson is a bit of an asshole to his new neighbors because they are an interracial couple, he's also trying to raise his two kids with a sense of righteousness. Okay so he's a caring father and a bad cop. But while Wilson and Washington make a perfect couple there's hints that Wilson isn't quite the man that Washington thinks she married. This ambiguity plays out while a wildfire burns offscreen during the first two acts.
When the fire gets too close for comfort near the end, obviously a metaphor for the friction between the neighbors, the wide shots of the flames across the valley from the neighborhood (Lake View Terrace is an actual suburb in the San Fernando Valley) add a dramatic weight that's balanced by what now must be a battle to the death between Jackson and Wilson.
Lakeview Terrace provides solid genre entertainment. You may be surprised at who you root for at different points in the film.