Red Eye

A seemingly random encounter on an airplane turns into a cat-and-mouse game between a young hotel manager (Rachel McAdams) and a terrorist (Cillian Murphy) who threatens to have her father killed unless she helps him assassinate a Cabinet official. If this dandy little thriller isn’t director Wes Craven’s masterpiece, it at least proves, even to those who disdain his horror-movie roots, that he’s a master filmmaker. Carl Ellsworth’s crafty script is preposterous but deliciously so—just real enough to engage our sympathies but just artificial enough that we relish the heroine’s predicament. Craven moves things along at such a breakneck pace (the movie runs a tight, frantic 85 minutes) that by the time we stop to reflect on all the contrivances and coincidences, we’ve had too good a time to care about them.