Flight

Flight (2012) — watch online Robert Zemeckis's drama starring Denzel Washington as a commercial airline pilot who saves nearly everyone on board and then has to face what he's been hiding. Paramount Pictures, 138 minutes.

Whip Whitaker inverts his aircraft at thirty thousand feet during a catastrophic mechanical failure and lands it in a field. Six people die. One hundred and two survive. The National Transportation Safety Board calls it an impossible maneuver that only one in a hundred pilots could have pulled off. The toxicology report complicates the story. Don Cheadle plays the defense attorney trying to keep Whitaker out of prison. Kelly Reilly is Nicole, a woman in recovery who holds a mirror up to a man who refuses to look into it. John Goodman shows up in two scenes and owns them both. Melissa Leo plays the investigator threading the needle toward the truth.

Zemeckis structured the film around a crash that lasts twelve minutes and an aftermath that lasts two hours. Denzel Washington earned an Academy Award nomination for a performance that never goes for easy sympathy. Watch Flight online on iFILM.