Job description: Show me someone who says they like flying, and I'll show you a liar. Sitting in a tin can with wings at 30,000 feet is an unnatural act - so even the most mediocre director shouldn't have too much trouble tapping into our innate fear of flying. The Mile-High White-Knuckle Ride doesn't usually boast much of a plot - typically some variation of Die Hard-on-a-plane suffices - but then it doesn't have to, because frequent fliers will already be weak at the knees just from reliving their own moments of private terror in the skies. Especially effective when viewed in a cinema, because sitting in rows, packed in like sardines and eating junk food makes the terror all that more realistic.
Recently seen in: Flightplan, starring Jodie Foster, is basically Panic Room-on-a-plane, with just a touch of Die Hard. It starts out with great promise, but quickly lapses into cliche, with holes in the plot so big you could fly an Airbus through them. When her daughter (Marlene Lawston) disappears during a flight, Foster's character embarks on a frantic search through the plane (fortunately, her late engineer-husband helped design the aircraft). The finger of suspicion moves from a shifty-looking Sean Bean, who's the captain, to some shiftier-looking Arabs to an air marshall (Peter Sarsgaard) and then to Foster's character herself. There are enough red herrings to fill a fishing trawler. One critic suggests that German director Robert Schwentke's first US effort is a game of two halves: 'The first half is vintage Hitchcock, the second is pure Steven Seagal.'
Most likely to say: 'Mummy, are we there yet?''
Classics of the genre: Released a month or so before Flightplan, Red Eye is a taut, tense and wild ride that taps into post-September 11 fears and just about rehabilitates horror-meister Wes Craven's reputation.
Rachel McAdams (below) and Cillian Murphy star in this flick about a woman trapped on a plane next to a terrorist. Craven milks paranoia and claustrophobia to the nth degree, and it's worth seeing just for the first half-hour, which encapsulates everything that's rotten about modern air travel in one wince-inducing sequence.
Airport is the film that pretty much created the genre, with Dean Martin scarcely believable as the pilot of a bombed plane, Burt Lancaster as the harried airport chief and a cabin full of stock characters. Airport 75, the first of many sequels, was better (the rest were far, far worse), with Charlton Heston as the hero of the hour. Honourable mention also goes to Passenger 57, with Wesley Snipes saving the plane from villains, including Elizabeth Hurley, while mouthing lines such as, 'Always bet on black!'. Likewise, Executive Decision, which features Kurt Russell and Seagal in full action mode, fighting a plane full of - you guessed it - terrorists.
