The Quiet American: Sully was the modest hero who saved 155 lives on the Hudson River. It's a white-knuckle corker - just don't watch it as an in-flight movie, writes BRIAN VINER 

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 Sully (12A)

Rating:

Bleed For This (15) 

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Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger, mercifully nicknamed Sully, was the US Airways pilot who, in January 2009, was forced to land his stricken plane, shortly after take-off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport, on the Hudson River, alarmingly close to midtown Manhattan.

There were 155 passengers and crew on board. Everyone survived.

So how does director Clint Eastwood generate tension when we already know the blessed outcome? This is not the kind of blighted flight that Paul Greengrass recreated so vividly in the 9/11 film United 93.

Besides, even in movies about dramatic plane journeys in which nobody dies, there’s usually a hijacking, a hurricane or at least some hysteria to crank up the relief of the happy-ever-after ending.

The film unfolds like a thriller, and a grippingly good one, for which Eastwood must share credit with his screenwriter, Todd Komarnicki, and with his star, Tom Hank

Not here. US Airways Flight 1549 took off for Charlotte, North Carolina, but within three minutes it had struck a flock of geese, crippling both engines.

Not long after that, Sullenberger landed the plane on the Hudson.

The real drama lasted less than ten minutes. Yet still the film unfolds like a thriller, and a grippingly good one, for which Eastwood must share credit with his screenwriter, Todd Komarnicki, and with his star, Tom Hanks.

White-haired and moustachioed, Hanks is at his absolute best in the title role, suppressing his natural, twinkly-eyed charisma to convey a thoroughly decent and dignified everyman, highly competent but overwhelmingly ordinary. Even, perhaps, a little dull.

Sullenberger is deeply uneasy at being thrust into the unforgiving glare of the media spotlight, and not especially comfortable, either, with being hailed a hero.

As loyal co-pilot Jeff Skiles, Aaron Eckhart is also terrific; likewise Laura Linney as Sully’s steadfast wife. This is not a film which requires any grandstanding, either from its actors or the old warhorse behind the camera.

Eastwood is 86 now, which makes it some achievement to have delivered easily his best picture, in my view, since he made Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby when he was a mere stripling in his early 70s.

I suppose there will come a time when age begins to diminish him, but there’s precious little sign yet. Hanks has even admitted how scary it is to be directed by Clint, with the ever-present risk of that deadly Dirty Harry stare.

(I can understand that, having once, on a sunny California day rendered instantly frosty, been on the receiving end of it myself.)

Sully opens with some clever directorial sleight of hand. Or cheating, if you prefer. The plane crashing into a Manhattan skyscraper turns out to be a nightmare from which Sullenberger wakes in a cold sweat.

But the point is made. Had it not been for the pilot’s expertise, New York could have suffered another catastrophic fireball. The spectre of the Twin Towers has been summoned, and it haunts the rest of the film.

Yet that’s not where the suspense comes from. Instead, by shuffling the chronology, Eastwood focuses not on what happened on the short flight, or what might have happened, but on what happened afterwards.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) launched an investigation, which here, with what I gather is dramatic licence, proceeds with an undercurrent of suspicion, hostility even.

The NTSB top brass clearly believe that Sullenberger mishandled the emergency; that he could either have steered the plane back to LaGuardia or to another nearby airport.

Far from saving the lives of everyone on board, the implication is that he endangered them, irresponsibly. It’s even suggested that one of the engines might still have been functioning.

That effectively whisks us into a courtroom drama that in lesser hands could seem cheesy, but instead, as the evidence flies back and forth, is completely riveting.

If there is any narrative misjudgment in the film, it lies in the slightly arbitrary and half-hearted effort to build back stories for a handful of the passengers.

On the whole, though, I cannot recommend Sully more highly.

In some of his films, Eastwood allows his star-spangled patriotism to run away with him, but this is a genuinely stirring celebration of the kind of understated American values — modesty, decency, quiet efficiency — that not even the veteran director, an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump, could possibly ascribe to the President-elect.

I add only one caveat. Don’t ever watch this movie on a plane, where the prospect of a bird strike killing both engines will start seeming less like a squillion-to-one chance and more like a nailed-on cert.

It is a powerful story, but writer-director Ben Younger never quite manages to lift it from the prosaic

Bleed For This is another true-life story of triumph against seemingly impossible odds, coincidentally also featuring Aaron Eckhart in the main supporting role, though here he is as derelict as in Sully he is upright.

He plays Kevin Rooney, a celebrated boxing trainer who had worked with Mike Tyson but was sliding into alcoholism by the time he took on another apparently busted flush, Vinny Pazienza (Miles Teller).

Pazienza had already won and lost a world title by the time Rooney advised him to move up a few weight divisions, whereupon he promptly won another, in 1991.

But then Pazienza, fancifully nicknamed the Pazmanian Devil, broke his neck in a car crash.

He had a protective metal ‘halo’ fitted around his head — the devil transformed into a saint — and it was touch and go whether he would even walk again.

The notion of him returning to the ring was unthinkable. Except to him. Eventually, with Rooney’s help, Pazienza made the unlikeliest of comebacks, outpointing the great (albeit by then, 43-year-old) Roberto Duran to become a world champ at three different weights.

That’s the basic story, and it is a powerful one, but writer-director Ben Younger never quite manages to lift it from the prosaic.

It’s not Teller’s fault; he’s a fine actor and proved as the jazz drummer in 2014’s Whiplash how good he can be at conveying a single-minded will to succeed.

There’s a very good scene when the halo is removed, and Pazienza insists on bearing the excruciating pain without anaesthetic.

Teller also looks the part (even if the fight scenes are overcooked, as they usually are in boxing films).

Eckhart is very good as well, while Ciaran Hinds appears to have done a stand-up job studying The Sopranos for his performance as Vinny’s father, paterfamilias over the kind of shouty, blue-collar Italian-American family that in the movies are always mixed up in boxing or gangsterdom.

Also in the credits is executive-producer Martin Scorsese, but the film doesn’t bear comparison with the greatest of all boxing biopics, his own Raging Bull. It never excited me, largely, though not entirely, because it somehow felt wrong to cheer on Pazienza’s decision to defy medical advice and risk paralysis.

Indeed, this film could hardly be coming out at a worse time, days after the British boxer Nick Blackwell required brain surgery after sparring again, despite having ended up in a medically induced coma after a fight earlier this year.

That was madness, and so, really, was this.