The Truman Show

Scripted by Gattaca's director/screenwriter Andrew Niccol, and flawlessly executed by director Peter Weir, this ingenious satirical comedy drama about media omnipotence is both dazzling and sophisticated from audacious start to poignant finale. In a role that reveals his dramatic range, Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, star of the world's most popular reality TV show, although Burbank doesn't know it. He thinks he lives in the idyllic island community of Seahaven, but it's just an elaborate set housed in a vast studio, and all his family and friends are really actors. How that realisation slowly dawns and spurs him on to find out what's real and what's fake in his emotionally confused universe is the stuff of ambitious cinematic brilliance. Carrey gives a suitably restrained performance, and he receives superlative support from Ed Harris (as the programme's creator Christof) and Laura Linney (as Truman's “wife”, Meryl).

A clever (if implausible) conceit that can be taken several ways: as a satire on our all-controlling media, as a comment on television's pervasiveness, and the way everyone wants to appear on it, or as an instance of situationists' desire to disrupt the s