Buried

Two of last year’s most challenging, gut-wrenching and cinematically amazing films (127 Hours and this claustrophobic fever-dream thriller) pitted a single man against self-survival under extraordinary, horrific conditions. Here director Rodrigo Cortés dares us to spend 94 Hitchcockian minutes with pretty-boy Ryan Reynolds inside a wooden coffin that is buried somewhere in Iraq. Reynolds credibly runs through a gauntlet of sweat-drenched emotions as a civilian truck driver who has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom. Armed with a lighter, tube light, cell phone, pen and pocket knife, he solicits rescue from the outside world and negotiates with his captors while an escalating war of words strafes such sociopolitical landmines as corporate greed, terrorism vs. criminality, lethal propaganda, hidden agendas and dirty little industrial-military complex secrets.