Flightplan

A claustrophobic, Hitchcockian thriller. A bereaved woman and her daughter are flying home from Berlin to America. At 30,000 feet the child vanishes and nobody admits she was ever on that plane.

AMG Plot: A woman is forced to prove her own sanity to save the life of her daughter in this taut thriller. Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) is a successful aircraft designer who has recently been dealing with the traumatic death of her husband. After traveling to Berlin on business with her six-year-old daughter, Julia (Marlene Lawston), Kyle falls asleep on their flight back to New York, only to discover that her daughter has gone missing. While not knowing where Julia has gone is troubling enough, even more disturbing is the insistence by pilot Gene Carson (Peter Sarsgaard) and Captain Rich (Sean Bean) that no records indicate that the child ever boarded the jet. As Kyle becomes increasingly desperate to find her daughter, she must prove to the men in charge that her daughter did in fact board the plane with her, and that this turn of events is not a product of her imagination. But if Julia has gone missing, who has taken her and why? Also starring Erika Christensen and Kate Beahan, Flightplan was the first English-language feature from German director Robert Schwentke. — Mark Deming

AMG Review: Jodie Foster gives a performance in Flightplan that is much better than the film deserves. She embodies intelligence mixed with an end-of-one's-emotional-tether intensity with a force that compels a viewer to believe what she is experiencing, but the problem is that what happens in the film is so implausible that the audience becomes disconnected from the film. As the situation grows more and more ridiculous, it becomes easy to wish that an actress less talented than Foster were playing the lead. The problem is compounded by a pitch-perfect Peter Sarsgaard, who understands exactly what kind of film he is in and delivers a scene-chewing performance that allows the viewer to laugh at the silliness of the situation without minimizing the director's intended level of menace. Director Robert Schwentke so enjoys playing sub-Hitchcockian games with perspective and framing that he has no time to focus on anything else. An attempt to comment on the ease with which a crowd can make racist conclusions about Arabs is simply exploitative, sickeningly so when one ponders on how easily the screenwriter and director let the audience and the characters off the hook in this regard. The third act is a clunky mess, offering one implausible scene after another until all that is left is sympathy for an actress who gave her all and was given no support whatsoever. — Perry Seibert