World Trade Center

But World Trade Center is an indisputably well made film otherwise, at its very best in the early scenes where the firefighters, led by McLoughlin, reach the general vicinity of the skyscrapers and slowly start to edge their way towards the rumbling buildings. This is stuff that the finest horror-movie directors would have been proud of – you get a visceral, firsthand impression of what it must have been like for those men to approach the Twin Towers (at that point, no one imagined that the two buildings would come crashing down, but it must have been terrifying even without that knowledge). We don’t actually see the towers too often in this scene (the abiding image is that of thousands of sheets of paper pouring out of the windows, like a nightmare version of those glass paperweights you turn upside down to simulate a snowfall), but we feel their awesome presence at all times – this is one of the few times that I’ve found the Dolby experience to be really effective in a movie hall. It’s like two angry active volcanoes have been transplanted to this urban setting and the firefighters are walking right into the heart of the inferno. This is an incredibly effective scene, and what follows is only marginally less gripping. Compared to some of Oliver Stone's recent work (Alexander, U-Turn, even Any Given Sunday) this is a surprisingly straightforward film – it looks like he's rediscovered the merits of good old-fashioned storytelling.