#25TH HOUR FULL MOVIE MOVIE#

But the mood the movie evokes right from the start, with a haunting display of the 88 beams of light shot into the sky each September 11 to memorialize the fallen towers, is practically documentary. And it’s true: 25th Hour feels like history. Critic Mick LaSalle likened it to Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, a movie that was filmed on the streets of Rome in the immediate wake of Nazi occupation. Rarely has a film so accurately approximated the raw nerve of recent history.

The city of New York-from its prep schools to its bars, its Korean groceries to its pickup basketball games-is the real star. The exceptional Brian Cox, meanwhile, plays his father. Rosario Dawson plays Monty’s girlfriend Naturelle, who for a time is suspected of being the one who sold Monty out to the DEA. And it stars Barry Pepper and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as his childhood friends, Frank and Jacob, respectively, who have their own uncertainties and anxieties to mend. It stars Edward Norton as Monty, in one of his best, most fiery performances. Premiering in New York in December 2002, just over a year after the first anniversary of the event, 25th Hour is, in my mind, a masterpiece.

In the wake of 9/11, that part of the story didn’t change, but for one key real-world adjustment: it became a movie about New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11. It is essentially a story about New Yorkers: how they think and feel, how they thrive, and who they are. In the 24 hours before his imprisonment, Monty sees old friends, tries to sew up old wounds, and speculates about his future, or rather his lack thereof. Like the book, the movie was to tell the story of a heroin dealer named Monty Brogan who was about to serve a seven-year sentence in prison. The book had unexpectedly stoked the interest of Hollywood types like Tobey Maguire and, eventually, Lee. It was a little crime drama written by the then-unknown screenwriter David Benioff, who’d adapted the script from his own debut novel, The 25th Hour. The story Lee was preparing to tell in his new movie had no immediate connection to what happened. It was a terrorist attack that killed 2,996 people on that fateful day. In 2001, Spike Lee was preparing to make a new crime movie set in New York City when, on the morning of September 11, two planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth, which also had been intended for Washington, D.C., into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

25th hour full movie