Jones and Cage.

Nicolas Cage might sleepwalk through much of his career, but if you think he can’t act, take another look at his staggering work in Leaving Las Vegas, or catch up with his cathartic, above-average performance in the new urban crime thriller Seeking Justice. It’s a welcome surprise.

Directed by New Zealand’s king of pain Roger Donaldson, it begins with an SUV pushed off the roof of a New Orleans parking garage in the middle of Mardi Gras. Nobody gets hurt except the driver, thus setting the scene for a formulaic explosion of mayhem and silliness. But brace yourself. What follows is a roller coaster ride, off the beaten track and dashed with detours, and unexpectedly plausible. Mr. Cage is Will Gerard, a hard-working, law-abiding English teacher in a ghetto high school on Rampart Street, whose wife, Laura, is a beautiful cellist in a classical orchestra, played by January Jones on a semester break from Mad Men. One night, leaving rehearsal on the way to her car, Laura is mugged, raped, brutally beaten and left for dead. At the hospital, while waiting for news of her critical condition, the distraught, shell-shocked Will is approached by a dapper but unctuously suspicious mystery man who introduces himself as simply “Simon” (Guy Pearce) and not only claims to know the assailant’s identity, but offers to kill him as a public service, reminding Will that if he pursues justice through normal channels it will take years and even if the rapist is convicted, his sentence will amount to “half the time you get for tax evasion.” The only catch is that Will might be called on at some future date for a “favor.” Despite obvious moral reservations and his resistance to breaking the law himself, Will gives in to his grief and rage, knowing the chances of ever catching his wife’s attacker and bringing him to justice in the nebulous and overburdened court system are next to impossible.

The deed is done. The culprit is eliminated in a gang-style execution and Will thinks the case is closed. Fat chance. His problems are just beginning, and six months later, when the paybacks begin, Will and Laura find themselves sinking deeper into a trap of criminal involvement that reaches nightmare proportions. The action leapfrogs across the city, propelled by secret handshakes, clandestine meetings in raunchy saloons, clues in a certain brand of chocolate bar from a candy dispenser, and cryptic spy-movie passwords like “the hungry rabbit jumps,” and culminates in a gun battle staged in the deserted section of the New Orleans Superdome that has never been restored since Hurricane Katrina. They can’t go to the cops because they’re members of the vigilante group too. The movie relies heavily on the mass panic of Americans whose civil liberties are slowly being diminished by such invasive forces as Homeland Security and the growing impotence of the criminal court system. Strangely, it only occasionally challenges credulity, and the script by Robert Tannen is so rooted in convincing realism that it really keeps you going. The film is aided immeasurably the total realism of the three central performances. Mr. Cage is an average Joe who could be your accountant or your friendly teller at Citibank. Ms. Jones still has the most beautiful hair in show business, and in her portrayal of an innocent wife plunged into a vortex of trauma, there’s not a strand out of place. Bald for no reason but affectation, the versatile and always reliable Guy Pearce is creepy and riveting as an independent hit man who circumvents the time-wasting hours of legal red tape that renders impotent the victims of hoodlums and thugs by taking the errant law into his own hands. Behind the mask of a soft-spoken solid citizen’s concern for fairness and justice, he hides a lethal promise of inescapable evil. The secret organization that recruits ordinary citizens to dispose of the scumbags responsible for the Crescent City going to hell is supported by even the most powerful city fathers until “Simon,” the leader of the gang, spirals out of control and goes viral, disposing of investigative journalists and anyone else who attempts to expose him. Hard to reconcile, I grant you, but I bought it. The acting, writing and production values are coherent and naturalistic enough to make even the most challenging plot twists seem logical.

My one caveat: Mr. Donaldson, a foreign director shooting on location in a New Orleans with which he is clearly unfamiliar, fails to take advantage of the exotic ambience of the most photogenic city in America. You get car chases on generic overpasses and homicides in seedy hotel rooms, and there is one scene in which Mr. Cage mails a letter at the Audubon Park Zoo, but for all you see of the defining atmosphere of a lush and beautiful city that can never be duplicated on a Hollywood sound stage, Seeking Justice could just as easily take place in Bakersfield, Brooklyn, or Altoona, Pa. Still, the movie satisfies, standing stand on its own even without the visual garnish. I’m usually pretty good at figuring these things out, but I didn’t have a clue what was coming next. Seeking Justice is an intense thriller so full of shocks it keeps you wired from start to finish.

rreed@observer.com

SEEKING JUSTICE

Running Time 105 minutes

Written by Todd Hickey (story) and Robert Tannen (screenplay)

Directed by Roger Donaldson

Starring Nicolas Cage, January Jones and Guy Pearce

3/4

Nicolas Cage: Vampire? (CBS)

If you haven't been keeping track of the topsy-turvy adventure that is the Nicolas Cage promotional tour for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, then you aren't maximizing this Friday to its fullest WTF potential.

From finally confronting those rumors that he's a vampire ("It's possible") to comparing his skills with that of Led Zeppelin, to saying that he's definitely not a vampire, take 10 minutes and remind yourself why Cagemania was the original Linsanity.

On being a vampire:

This rumor that Mr. Cage is a vampire was started by an Ebay user trying to sell a photograph, so we don't understand why the actor feels the need to address the issue at all, except that people keep bringing it up.

If only he'd keep his stories straight though! On Late Night, Mr. Cage claims he is not a time-traveling vampire:

He does make the valid point that it's a photograph, and everyone knows you can't photograph a vampire. So he's just a time-traveler, then. Of course, it's hard to dispel rumors when there's this video floating around:

Moving on, Mr. Cage also discussed the decision-making process for choosing movie roles:

I think that if you go about making movies to win Oscars, you're really going about it the wrong way. I think that it's ... right now, what I'm excited about is trying to create a [pauses] kind of a cultural understanding through my muse that is part of the zeitgeist that isn't motivated by vanity or magazine covers or awards. It's more, not countercultural, but counter-critical. I would like to find a way to embrace what Led Zeppelin did, in filmmaking.

(Wow, that seems way more complicated than the previous theory floated about what constitutes a Nicolas Cage feature.)

Of course, Nicolas Cage is not without a sense of humor about himself, and has absolutely no qualms about appearing on Saturday Night Live next to Andy Samberg's hilarious imitation of the actor for a "Get in the Cage" segment.

How long until Nicolas Cage does a Reddit cameo? "AMA real life time-traveling cyber vampire: Not the Bees! Ahhh!"

Kidman and Gigandet.

How many ways can a film go wrong? Too many to list, and Trespass finds them all. This pointless, unintentionally campy home-invasion thriller, directed by Joel Schumacher, is as bad as it gets, and as one dumb red herring follows another, it just gets sillier and sillier. By the end, the audience at the screening I attended was roaring with laughter.

Before the masked killers arrive to brutalize them and destroy their high-tech mansion in the middle of the Louisiana swamps, Kyle and Sarah Miller (Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman) seem like the perfect couple. He is either a diamond merchant or a real estate tycoon (he’s hiding priceless gems and selling property on his mobile at the same time to reluctant clients). She’s an architect who designed an impractical glass house (in hurricane country?). She wears skin-tight, breast-stretching T-shirts and looks younger than their teenage daughter, Avery (Liana Liberato), although everybody is too obnoxious and self-involved to notice. Forbidden to party all night with the fast crowd at a cocaine-snorting orgy, Avery locks herself in her room and ignores the dinner tray Mom leaves on the floor. Meanwhile, Dad busies himself behind closed doors fiddling with a walk-in safe, talking secretly into a cell phone every waking moment, and heading for his Porsche to conduct mysterious “business.” Then the electronic chimes go off, the gate locks sound an alarm, and the house is invaded by men dressed like security guards, waving guns and ordering the family to gather in the living room. Uh-oh, Avery has sneaked out to party hearty somewhere on the bayou, and the nightmare begins. Demanding “everything you’ve got,” the intruders start slapping Mom around and knocking Dad’s eyeglasses onto the marble floor. From here on, the movie goes viral and incredulity reigns.

Instead of giving the hoodlums what they want to save his family and dream house, Kyle chooses argumentation over pragmatism. Why is he so uncooperative? While the movie shifts between the home invasion and the daughter’s party in the fast lane, Mr. Miller turns adversarial enough to dare the crooks to open fire with their Uzis, then arrogant enough to offer them a split in the stolen diamonds in his safe. Yes! He’s a criminal too! (Cue the giggles.) Instead of giving them the illegal gems, which are no longer in the safe and which can be traced, he stupidly negotiates with them, offering to find a fence, only minutes away from torture and death. The wife isn’t acting too rational either. Why does she keep flirting with the gang leader’s handsome younger brother (Cam Gigandet, the hunk from Burlesque)? He knows the house. Has he been there before, at Sarah’s invitation? Does her husband know? Aha! Here come the security tapes and there he is, in flashbacks, emerging almost naked from the swimming pool into her open arms. Enter the rebellious teenage sexpot, who goes hysterical, offering the tattooed girlfriend of one of the invaders a Vicodin. For hostages, nobody shows a lick of common sense. Or maybe it’s just bad acting. One thing is clear. The screaming, shrieking, weeping and cussing does not come from terror, but from a bad script and confused, unfocused direction. Instead of nervous tension, the audience reacts with nervous guffaws.

Trespass reunites the director with Mr. Cage, whom he directed in 8MM, and Ms. Kidman, who worked for him on the demented Batman Forever, two of the worst films of their careers. This one is worse. Stretching the talk from here to next week, director Schumacher avoids any real confrontation or plot development. The idiotic script, by somebody named Karl Gajdusek, makes no attempt at character exploration. Cameras soar around the room in a futile attempt to keep the action twisted and frantic, but the result is nausea, not tension. After getting banged around like a rag doll, Nicole Kidman turns black, blue and bloody, actually managing the impossible feat of looking cadaverous—and it’s not just the makeup. Meanwhile, something odd is happening to Mr. Cage’s face. His skin is yellow, his cheeks are swollen, and his head is too big for his body. The worst thing that ever happened to Hollywood is the invention of Botox.

rreed@observer.com

TRESPASS

Running Time 91 minutes

Written by Karl Gajdusek

Directed by Joel Schumacher

Starring Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman and Cam Gigandet

1/4

Like Nic Cage, whose real estate problems have been well documented, the former Merrill bigwig Robert Fuscone is in trouble. His 18,471-square-foot Westchester mansion ("two swimming pools, two elevators, six fireplaces, 11 bathrooms and a seven-car garage") was scheduled for a Thursday foreclosure, which was postponed after he filed for bankruptcy.

According to a press release at the time of his 2000 retirement from Merrill, Mr. Fuscone had held nice-sounding jobs at the firm like executive chairman for Latin America and Canada (sadly, the Journal leaves out the Canadian part), the COO of Merrill's Corporate and Institutional Client Group, the co-head of Global Fixed Income and then the sole head of Global Debt Markets. "Rick has built an outstanding reputation for his business savvy, leadership skills, sound judgment and personal integrity," two company executives said then. "We are grateful for his many contributions to our firm and wish him the very best in his future endeavors."

In a 1979 Forbes piece, Mr. Fuscone gave an interview about commercial paper while staring "soberly into a Virgin Mary in the executive aerie atop Merrill Lynch." He is also seen "nibbling nonchalantly on a bread roll."

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

What's the story: What's the sound of one million girls screaming? Allow us to introduce you to New Moon. (Excuse us, The Twilight Saga: New Moon; get a more clunky title.) The sequel to runaway hit Twilight includes more heartbreak (Edward dumps Bella!), more werewolves (Team Jacob!) and more length (this thing clocks in at an arduous-sounding 130 minutes). The guaranteed smash has some people predicting Iron Man-type box office, but that hasn't stopped the critics from piling on. While the Observer's Sara Vilkomerson found much to love despite acknowledging many flaws, the rest of the critical community seems to be making up for the fact that they gave Twilight decent reviews. That said, we doubt anyone planning to see New Moon really cares what Roger Ebert or Jeffrey Wells think.

Who should see it: Sookie Stackhouse.

The Blind Side

What's the story: While the girls will be crying over New Moon (oh those Romeo & Juliet references!), expect the boys to shed a tear or three at showings of The Blind Side. Full disclosure: we haven't seen the John Lee Hancock adaptation of Michael Lewis' best selling book, but considering the trailer makes us weep every single time we watch it, we'll be sure to bring some extra Kleenex to the theater. Sandra Bullock and her ridiculous Southern accent star as Linda Touhy, the real life heroine who took an underprivileged teenager named Michael Oher into her home and helped turn him into a star football player. (Spoiler alert? Oher now plays for the Baltimore Ravens). Critics are surprisingly happy with this effort and it just looks like the type of feel-good flick that could play well into the Christmas season. Between this and The Proposal, it's safe to say Sandra Bullock has returned. (Don't worry Sandy: we forgot All About Steve, too.)

Who should see it: Baltimore Ravens QB Joe Flacco.

Planet 51

What's the story: We like to consider ourselves on the front line of cultural minutiae, but even we haven't heard of Planet 51. And that it's opening on over 3,000 theaters is all the more disconcerting. The animated affair from Sony (on a roll after Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) features the voices of Dwayne Johnson, Jessica Biel, Gary Oldman and Justin Long and a premise as old as The Twilight Zone: an astronaut lands on a planet inhabited by little green men and women, making him the alien. Ha! Our sides. If you have to choose between taking your kids to see this over the weekend or watching Up for the fifth time in a week, do yourself a favor and put the DVD in for another spin.

Who should see it: E.T.

Also opening this weekend: Nicolas Cage goes batshit crazy in Werner Herzog's off-the-rails remake, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans; Pedro Almodovar and his muse, Penelope Cruz, endure some Broken Embraces; and John Woo heads to Red Cliff.

"You get a photo of it and, what do you do with it?" Mr. Osher asked The Observer. Well, put it on the Internet, of course! "The average person gets a photo of a celebrity and they save it to their desktop, they email their ten best friends and family, maybe they put it on their social networking site like Facebook and the story dies there," Mr. Osher explained. He decided to help keep these real-life encounters alive by creating MeetTheFamous.com—a site that enables its users to become their own celebrity blogger. Its tagline: "MeetTheFamous.com: Where YOU Are the Paparazzi."

"What I want to do is provide a home for these people," Mr. Osher, the site’s creator and chief executive, told The Observer from his Fifth Avenue office. "Instead of the story just dying on their desktop, is to share their encounter, share their experience, share their photos with the world and get paid for it."

At MeetTheFamous.com, users can create a profile and upload their own pictures and videos of celebrities. The site has signed an exclusive partnership with a top photo agency (Mr. Osher declined to disclose the name of the agency) to license and sell their photos to sites like TMZ and Just Jared and magazines like InStyle. Whatever the photo agency sells, users receive 50 percent of the commission through PayPal. Also, MeetTheFamous.com staffers choose several posts to be featured on the site's home page every day. Users who create those featured posts get a $25 bonus.

For "Jenny from Idaho who has never seen a celebrity in her whole life," Mr. Osher said, she can become their "own Perez Hilton," by blogging about photos posted on the site. There’s also a Celebrity Trivia game and a Celebrity Clue game that offers daily and weekly cash prizes. Features like Celebrity Closet also note the brand names of the clothing celebrities have on and where users can snag that skirt for themselves. The site also ranks the "most popular paparazzi" (based on profile views) and the best money-making "top paparazzi."

Launched in mid-October 2008, the site (which is funded by V.C's s in New York, Ohio, Connecticut and Chicago) has collected more than 16,000 photos of photos submitted by its 5,000 users. Headlines include: "Nicolas Cage Does a Hairplug Check"; "Lady Gaga Gets Horny On Stage"; and "Scarlett (Johansson) is one Transtastic Starlet." Mr. Osher said some of the most interesting submissions include one of Gerard Butler—the Hulk-like actor who played a king in 300. An old acting classmate submitted a photo of him looking much thinner, with floppy hair and a nerdy look. Mr. Osher said publishers were clambering to create a "before and after" feature with the picture.

Another was submitted by a tattoo artist of his recent work on Rihanna—two guns on her ribcage. "This was picked up by Extra TV and TMZ was on it," Mr. Osher said.

Mr. Osher came up with the idea for the site from his cubicle. "Just like the next person, I love the celebrity news and the celebrity gossip and I found myself going to these blogs," Mr. Osher said. "But there was never anything to do there. I was always, 15 seconds and I'm done, I'll wait for the next story to come. I always wanted more."

"If someone posts something like Madonna was spotted at a Starbucks at 43rd and 2nd at 9 a.m., what am I supposed to do with that? Am I supposed to sit at Starbucks the next day and wait for her?"

Mr. Osher said users can bank on getting photos that even the paparazzi can't get. Most celebrities know when paparazzi are watching and act accordingly. But if undercover, everyday folks are camera-ready with their iPhones, what will MeetTheFamous.com users catch them doing next?

For example, Mr. Osher used to live in Los Angeles and was "'attempting' to be an actor," he wrote in an email. He had a small part in the movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith, starring then-undercover lovers Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. "I filmed a scene with only Brad and Angelina when the whole rumors of 'are they hooking up or not' were swirling around. If I had a camera phone back then, let's just say I could have taken a photo that would have been in all the celebrity magazines the next day. Unfortunately, there wasn't a place like MeetTheFamous.com to go and post the photo to back then."

Perhaps most MeetTheFamous.com users won't be so lucky and many of their submissions will capture celebrities going about their daily routines—getting coffee, picking up dry cleaning, picking their noses. But for some reason we’re just as obsessed with those pictures as the scandalous shots—just pick up an issue of In Touch for proof.

"Celebrities are everyday people," Mr. Osher continued. "They take their kids to school, they walk their dogs, they go to restaurants, they cheat on their spouses and they get in fights. And they're not ghosts. People see them on an everyday basis."

Mr. Osher might consider geo-targeting and mobile applications for MeetTheFamous.com. But for now he and his five other staff members, are focusing on getting the product right, building partnerships, and "'getting out into the mainstream,' of course," Mr. Osher added. "It has to get to the point where people are like, ‘I gotta get a picture on MeetTheFamous.'”

We’re not sure we’d go as far as New York magazine did earlier this week when they proclaimed Nicolas Cage “America’s Sweetheart,” but the man certainly has quite a following. What other way is there to explain the success of Knowing? The apocalyptic science-fiction film—we won’t spoil it for you, but if you’d like to read about the bananas ending, head over to the film’s Wikipedia entry—somehow grossed nearly $25 million dollars at the box office last weekend despite the fact that no one you know went to see it. The thing that separates Mr. Cage from his A-list contemporaries is his resiliency; he can follow up a bomb like Bangkok Dangerous with a midsize hit like Knowing, even if the difference in quality of both films is barely discernable. While the Teflon star counts his money, four other movies hit theaters this weekend, but only one will be mentioned in headlines come Monday morning. (Hint: It’s the animated one!) Here’s a handy guide to the new releases.

Monsters vs. Aliens

What’s the story: As you can no doubt tell from the title, monsters fight aliens in the latest attempt from Dreamworks to unseat Pixar as the preeminent animation brand. If you’re worried about this just being for kids, fear not. The voice cast is loaded with actors and actresses you love, including Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett, Kiefer Sutherland, John Krasinski and Amy Poehler. Monsters vs. Aliens is more than just another blockbuster, however; opening on nearly 1,600 3-D screens, it’s a litmus test for the future viability of the technology. If the film does well, studios like Fox—which has James Cameron’s 3-D behemoth Avatar coming in December—will breathe a sigh of relief; if Monsters vs. Aliens falls flat, however, expect much hand wringing and brow furrowing.

Who should see it: The Monster Squad.

The Haunting in Connecticut

What’s the story: In case you were wondering … yes, Hollywood does release a horror movie every week. The Haunting in Connecticut looks particularly disgusting; the poster, which has been strewn all over subway stations around the city, features a young boy throwing up what looks to be a monster. And that’s the image on the poster! Whatever The Haunting in Connecticut does for an encore, we don’t want to know.

Who should see it: Senator Chris Dodd.

12 Rounds

What’s the story: WWE wrestler John Cena does his best Dwayne Johnson–circa-2004 impression, as a beefed-up detective who tries to save his kidnapped girlfriend, in the latest from Renny Harlin. Yep, the same Renny Harlin who directed the classic '90s action films Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger has now been reduced to helming what looks like a future TNT schedule filler. We guess Hollywood really hasn’t forgotten Cutthroat Island.

Who should see it: “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.

The Education of Charlie Banks

What’s the story: Finally, a real movie! The Squid and the Whale’s Jesse Eisenberg stars as a privileged college student who has his world shaken by the reappearance of a poor and violent former neighborhood friend (Jason Ritter). Think The O.C. without any Death Cab for Cutie. The Education of Charlie Banks looks moody and sharp, features a fantastic young cast—in addition to Messrs. Eisenberg and Ritter, the film co-stars Chris Marquette, Sebastian Stan and Susan Sarandon’s daughter, the beautiful Eva Amurri—and has gotten very good reviews. So consider our surprise when we saw that Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst was the director. We’re a long way from “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.”

Who should see it: Korn lead singer Jonathan Davis.

Pace University's three-day "Aftershock" conference ("Rethinking the Future Since Sept. 11") will have closed its curtains by the weekend.

Katie Couric weighs in tonight with an assessment of national security while Ted Koppel will dig in Sunday.

The two photo exhibits downtown will stick around for a while, but if you want to see a set of memorial quilts, you better get there Friday.

It's obvious why presenters would want to start early, but we have to wonder, how long can Americans remain in this commemorative state?

Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" (starring Nicolas Cage, above) premiered three weeks ago on 2,957 screens. It has already closed on 55 of them.

-Matthew Schuerman

Once again, the alarm is being sounded by naysayers that it is “too soon” to make movies on the subject of 9/11. Five years is too soon? The first Hollywood film dealing with a key American defeat in the Pacific, John Farrow’s Wake Island, came out the same year (1942) that the American Marine garrison on the island was virtually annihilated by the Japanese. That was, of course, another time, another war and another world. More people seemed more involved back then. The current war on terror seems to be something that most of us can switch off on our television sets and forget that it is still going on far away; comparatively few of us are actively or even emotionally involved. In fact, we were solemnly instructed by our commander in chief shortly after 9/11 that it was our patriotic duty to keep spending freely and enjoying ourselves in order to keep our economy flourishing. Indeed, I have already met people who say they’re not going to see World Trade Center because they’re afraid it will depress them.

Anyway, it seems a little ridiculous to focus an entire film on two survivors from a disaster that took more than 2,700 lives. Indeed, John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, two Port Authority police officers, were the 18th and 19th out of a mere 20 survivors who were pulled out of the rubble after the Twin Towers collapsed, killing a few hundred police officers and firefighters. Can the same charges be leveled at Mr. Stone, Ms. Berloff and their colleagues as were leveled at Steven Spielberg and his collaborators for celebrating Oskar Schindler’s achievement in saving the lives of some 1,200 Jews out of the six million who perished in the Nazi Holocaust? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The important thing to remember is that neither 9/11 nor the Nazi Holocaust are very far from our current concerns.

I had barely begun my review when news of the foiled Heathrow bomb plot flooded the media, pushing the Israeli-Hezbollah-Lebanese-Iranian-Syrian-Iraqi-Sunni-Shiite-American-British-U.N. morass onto the media back burner. The new nightmare of liquid explosives on trans-Atlantic jetliners threatened to wreak havoc on both the airline and the cosmetic industries. Some people are demanding more ethnic and racial profiling, and new conspiracy theories are spreading like wildfire among the bloggers on the Internet; again, there were the suggestions that 9/11 was pre-arranged by the U.S. government to facilitate our invasion of Iraq. Of course, there are still people out there who fervently believe that the J.F.K. assassination was engineered by L.B.J. and his minions. The trouble with conspiracy theories is that they never explain how these secrets can be kept (and multiple book contracts forestalled) in our centers of power.

Oliver Stone is no stranger to the conspiracy theories engendered by political controversy, and he has certainly never been afraid to be considered leftish to a fault. But in World Trade Center, he plays everything straight and even a bit conformist. He realizes that he is dealing with real-life stories, real-life backgrounds and a real-life tragic event for the thousands of surviving relatives of the victims. His two major protagonists are suburban civil servants, devout Christians and dedicated men. There is a good chance, as Mr. Stone himself has admitted, that their politics don’t correspond to his own. (Indeed, in a foolishly unguarded moment after 9/11, Mr. Stone expressed an interest in telling the story of 9/11 from the point of view of the Islamic terrorists.) No matter: Mr. Stone is no stranger to courage and heroism either, regardless of ideology.

There is no foolishness in World Trade Center, only the sheer shock of surprise with which most of us responded to the events on that day. The action begins before daybreak in Goshen, N.Y., where Sgt. John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) of the Port Authority Police Department is getting ready for the daily commute to his job. He tries not to wake his still-sleeping wife, Donna (Maria Bello). After he looks in on his four sleeping children, he gets into his car for the drive to the Port Authority terminal. It is the morning of Sept. 11, at first a day like any other. The exposition is minimal, seemingly random, but every so often all the sight lines converge to the now-vanished Twin Towers. The first accounts of the attack are repeated, with the same familiar images shown again and again.

At the time, I was at 89th Street and Madison Avenue waiting for the M-4 bus to Columbia University. I had heard something on CNN about a plane hitting the World Trade Center, but I had assumed that it was an accident. I knew more at the time than Sergeant McLoughlin and his contingent of policemen as they set out to rescue people from the north tower: They didn’t know that a second plane had hit the south tower. Communications were scandalously bad all around, but Mr. Stone and his collaborators do not indulge in any second-guessing of the authorities. They cut almost immediately to the chase, or rather to the Beckett-like stasis of the rubble under which McLoughlin and two of his police comrades soon find themselves buried, still alive but, to all intents and purposes, effectively entombed. All the other members of the would-be rescue group are dead, and when one of the three survivors uses his service revolver to end his benumbed despair, McLoughlin is left alone under the rubble with Officer Will Jiminez (Michael Peña), who is not within sight of McLoughlin but is within earshot, so that the two men can communicate throughout their 12-hour ordeal. Much of the rest of the two-hour-plus film takes place in these ultra-confined surroundings.

The only “relief” from this claustrophobic mise-en-scène, imaginatively reproduced on a Los Angeles soundstage, are frequent extended visits to the anguished families of McLoughlin and Jiminez in Goshen, N.Y., and Clifton, N.J., respectively. Fortunately, one could not ask for more accomplished performers than Mr. Cage and Mr. Peña underground, and Ms. Bellow and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Allison Jiminez aboveground, to sustain this constricted narrative.

This is to say that World Trade Center is an unusually strenuous and taxing exercise in summer entertainment, and I would not recommend it at all were it not for the exquisite performances of the four principals, and the sincerity and conviction with which Mr. Stone has directed them. As the auteur himself aptly observed: “Although my politics and John and Will’s may be different, it didn’t matter: we all got along. I can make a movie about their experiences because they went through something I can understand. Politics does not enter into it—it’s about courage and survival.”

A Bright Spot

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ Little Miss Sunshine, from a screenplay by Michael Arndt, turns out to be the funniest and most gracefully written, acted and directed dysfunctional-American-family farce comedy of the year thus far. It is also satirically satisfying and happily heartwarming, and this is quite an achievement for a moviegoing year so widely deplored as this one. I have never heard of the co-directors or the screenwriter, and that is more good news for my readers, since I cannot possibly have any auteurist ax to grind or sway my opinion. As far as I could see, there wasn’t a false move in the picture, which is amazing for a genre in which so many things can go wrong and over the top. And yet the filmmakers have found ingenious ways to keep the action moving without any long-winded explanations of the extreme eccentricities of all the major characters.

In one way or another, all six members of this colorfully extended family qualify as losers of one kind or another. This is particularly and ironically true of Richard (Greg Kinnear), the family’s stuffy paterfamilias, who lectures to largely empty halls on the “seven steps to success.” Sheryl (Toni Collette), Richard’s patiently long-suffering wife, is unsuccessfully battling a compulsive smoking habit, but she is currently preoccupied with her gay and suicidal brother-in-law, Frank (Steve Carrell), the self-proclaimed No. 1 Proust scholar in America, who has just lost both his teaching job and his male graduate assistant to the No. 2 Proust scholar in America. When No. 2 wins a MacArthur “genius” grant as well, it is more than Frank can bear: He slashes his wrists, and Sheryl comes to the hospital emergency room to take him home to the family. Frank has to share a room with his teenage nephew Dwayne (Paul Dano), who comes equipped with his own set of oddities, namely a passion for Nietzsche and a vow of silence that he’s taken until he’s old enough to become a pilot for the U.S. Air Force. Communicating exclusively with a pencil and a small notepad, Dwayne asks the amused Frank if he plans to commit suicide in their shared bedroom. When Frank assures him that he’s not planning such a course of action, Dwayne expresses his relief—also in writing.

The family circle at the dinner table is completed by surly, heroin-sniffing Grandpa (Alan Arkin) and the would-be “Little Miss Sunshine” herself, pint-sized, bespectacled Olive (Abigail Breslin). During the predictably stormy dinner of hopelessly incompatible egos, Sheryl receives a call from her sister telling her that Olive has successfully qualified for the “Little Miss Sunshine” contest, to be held in California.

Richard decides in his infinite wisdom that the whole family will accompany Olive, since neither Frank nor Grandpa can be left behind. Besides, on the long trip from their home in Albuquerque, N.M., to California, Richard can stop off in Scottsdale, Ariz., to pressure his publishing connection into releasing his seven steps to success in best-selling book form.

What happens next would seem to be foreordained, but it really isn’t. Of course, everything goes wrong for everyone, but never in such a way that any of the family members is irreparably alienated or separated from the concept of the family as a whole. At times, the narrative skirts the edge of gruesomeness without ever falling into that abyss, and in the end everyone has learned to accept his or her limitations within the context of the unwavering, if often contentious, solidarity of the family itself. The timing of all six leads is impeccable, and it is often the rest of the world that appears a bit shortsighted and out of step when confronted by the irresistible unity of a family. If I tried to describe the film in greater detail, I would be giving away much of the sheer pleasure of the experience. So see it and discover its exuberantly kinetic pleasures for yourself.

Correction: Last week’s column erroneously spelled the name of the great critic and scholar Louis Kronenberger with a “C” rather than a “K.”