Coincidentally, one of the four Netflix movies Maggie and I had at our disposal during our flight to Dublin last week was Flightplan. After some hesitancy that the in-flight viewing of a film in which things go wrong mid-air was either illegal or inconsiderate, we decided to throw caution to the wind, lower the tray tables, and sink our teeth into this Jodie Foster pic about a mother whose daughter goes missing in the middle of a transatlantic flight. Choosing to watch Flightplan in any setting shows no abundance of caution, however, as the film was rather tepidly received upon its release. And for good reason. Like airline food, this thriller leaves a lot to be desired.
Foster does a decent job as a grieving widow transporting her husband’s body in the double-decker high-tech plane she helped design, but as the plot takes a turn for the absurd, and the holes in the story grow larger, she begins to phone in her scenes. Also seen here are two actors I admire: Peter Sarsgaard (great in Shattered Glass) as the passenger with more than one secret, and Sean Bean (Bond baddie in GoldenEye, recently in North Country) as the poorly-written captain of the plane. Suspend your disbelief and put yourself in entertainment autopilot, but don’t expect to reach great heights.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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