10. Fearless

Despite having one of Jeff Bridges' best performances and an Oscar-nominated turn from Rosie Perez, Peter Weir and Rafael Yglesias' Fearless was passed over at the box office and was overlooked during the awards season because it had the misfortune of coming out the same year (1993) as Schindler’s List. Thankfully, Fearless becomes more rich and intriguing with repeat viewings, and the film has haunting observations about how people react to catastrophic events.

Bridges plays Max Klein, an architect who miraculously survives a plane crash and even manages to save many of his fellow passengers. But Max begins isolating himself from his family and in particular his wife (sympathetically portrayed by Isabella Rossellini) and wonders if the accident has made him invulnerable. He can do things like eating strawberries that would have made him sick before, and the only person he seems to be able to relate to is a fellow crash survivor (Perez) who can't get over the loss of her child.

Yglesias made significant changes in adapting his novel to the screen (it was originally set in New York, not San Francisco), but both he and Weir show how people can occasionally recover from the emotional toll of tragedies without being maudlin, and the two have the courage to let the audience reach their own conclusions about the aftermath.

As a side note, the accident, which Weir saves for a flashback near the end of the film, is terrifying, and sadly the only DVD and VHS editions of this film are in full screen mode, so home viewers can get only a tiny inkling of the power of these sequences. (Dan Lybarger)