While United 93 dramatised the events of 11 September 2001 in hand-held, documentary style, here Oliver Stone uses broad brush strokes to convey the enormity of the attacks on New York. With four times the budget of Paul Greengrass's film, Stone employs disaster-movie effects and one showboating, digitally created aerial shot, to take us deep into the rubble of the collapsed buildings, where two Port Authority cops (Nicolas Cage, mercifully subdued, and Michael Peña) await rescue. Meanwhile their wives, a tightly wound Maggie Gyllenhaal and stoic Mario Bello, play their own fraught waiting game. Though based on the real-life experiences of the McLoughlin and Jimeno families, the story's resolution seems convenient and hokey. It's certainly well made, but anyone hoping for political context or comment from the director of JFK and Born on the Fourth of July will be disappointed by a film that - in the main - avoids controversy and focuses on heroism.

Two police officers struggle to survive when they become trapped beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.