5: Arlington Road (1999)

5: Arlington Road (1999) - An overdue moment of realisation.
College professor Jeff Bridges begins to suspect that his new neighbours (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) are terrorists - but is he being paranoid because of the current stress he is under or is there a good reason why the new guys have mysterious-looking blueprints and cordoned-off sections in their new house? Through the course of the movie Robbins and Cusack manipulate Bridges' sense of reality until finally they inveigle him into delivering a high-yield bomb to the FBI headquarters where his late wife used to work.

Impact: Though the plotting of Mark Pellington's ingenious thriller doesn't withstand any great scrutiny, the discovery that Bridges has been made a mule and scapegoat isn't easy to see coming, and the sheer audacity of this very unhappy ending combines with post 9/11 sensibility to extend the film's emotional wallop beyond its time.

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