Peter Weir directs Jeff Bridges, Isabella Rossellini and Rosie Perez in this allegorical drama where a man who survives an air crash keeps putting his life at risk to escape his PTSD.

Again… a formative movie. One of those adult movies that really broadened my horizons as a teenager. Got me into Weir. Got me into Bridges. It is both weighty and fuzzy, psychologically sophisticated but narratively simple. The ensemble is excellent, Allen Daviau’s on location cinematography is crisp and bold. Obviously the stand-out sequence is the plane crash, used as an interrupting framing device, threaded throughout the movie. But there’s also spiritual redemption, Christ metaphors, people resetting their personalities and rewriting their personal histories for prosaic reasons. In many respects this feel like the TV show’s Lost serious, more grounded elder brother. And Lost isn’t a dirty word in my house.

9

Perfect Double Bill: The Truman Show (1998)

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