by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
On one of America’s darkest days as a nation, a flight attendant named Betty Ann Ong made a phone call from her plane that changed the course of history. From American Airlines Flight 11, Ong calmly reported that the cockpit was “not answering.” Passengers had been injured, she relayed, and the aircraft appeared to be under hijackers’ control—“we’re being hijacked.” These words are Ong speaking into the airwaves, one of the very first mayday communications from inside an airline. Unfortunately this was just the opening salvo of a calculated attack that unfolded during that fateful Fall average Tuesday in New York City. A perfect day, with a “crystalline blue sky, a perfect day,” as one survivor remembered.
Ten Minutes from “Hell on Earth”: 9/11/2001 Live As It Happened
Twenty-five years later, September 11 exists in a divided America. Even in two minds of Americans: the millions who remember exactly where they stood when that horrific news shattered that beautiful Autumn morning in New York, and a subsequent digitally enabled generation for whom the history of the Twin Towers has always been pixelated footage and hearsay. Maybe a conspiracy theory or two thrown in?
Of course there’s Flight 93, where the passengers made famous a rallying cry, “Let’s Roll,” before they swarmed the hijackers to crash-land that plane before it could be weaponized. This is another tranche of memories from that Tuesday. But did you know on that same day, 38 planes with a reported seven-thousand fliers were diverted to Gander, a village-like city in Newfoundland, Canada, because American airspace has been shut down? That locals “adopted passengers” to feed, house?
On this 25th anniversary of 9/11, Screenmancer presents the best cinematic depictions of that catastrophic day. So to commemorate this quarter-century remembrance, we rounded up 10 narrative films that attempt a much harder task of recreating the event, or interpreting it, or incorporating it into a larger storyline.
You’ll also find TV projects that returned at the 10th, 20th and now 25th anniversaries, that pose their own thematic questions as memory turns to historic perspective in America.
TOP 10: WHEN HOLLYWOOD TOOK ON 9/11
| Film / Year | 9/11 Connection | How It Impacted Critics | How Fans Reacted |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. United 93 — 2006 Paul Greengrass Christian Clemenson, Cheyenne Jackson, David Alan Basche | Real-time-style reconstruction of United Flight 93 and the passengers who fought the hijackers before the aircraft crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. | The critical benchmark for dramatizing 9/11. Critics praised Greengrass for restraint, procedural realism and refusing conventional Hollywood heroics. 90% critics. | Audiences embraced a film deliberately difficult to watch: 83% audience score. Its reputation has endured less as entertainment than as an almost documentary-like act of remembrance. |
| 2. World Trade Center — 2006 Oliver Stone Nicolas Cage, Michael Peña, Maria Bello | True story of Port Authority police officers John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, trapped beneath the collapsed towers. | Critics were struck by Stone’s restraint: instead of conspiracy or politics, he made a narrow story of survival, families and rescuers. 66% critics. Others found it overly sentimental. | 60% audience score. Admirers responded to its rescue story and emotional directness; detractors questioned its sentimentality and reconstruction of events. |
| 3. Worth — 2020 Sara Colangelo Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci, Amy Ryan | Kenneth Feinberg confronts the impossible arithmetic of administering the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. More than $7 billion was ultimately distributed. | Critics responded to the morally impossible question at its center: how do you assign dollar values to human lives? 81% critics. Keaton, Tucci and Ryan drew particular notice. | 75% audience score. Viewers responded to the human stories behind what could have been a dry legal drama—the aftermath told through spouses, children, compensation formulas and grief. |
| 4. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close — 2011 Stephen Daldry Thomas Horn, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock | A boy searches New York for meaning after losing his father in the World Trade Center. Adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel. | One of the major critic/audience splits in the 9/11 filmography. Critics accused it of emotional manipulation and excessive sentiment: 45% critics, despite a Best Picture Oscar nomination. | Audiences were kinder: 61% audience score and an A− CinemaScore. Its grief story connected considerably more strongly with moviegoers than reviewers. |
| 5. Reign Over Me — 2007 Mike Binder Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett Smith | 9/11 appears through absence: a man who lost his wife and daughters in the attacks retreats into traumatic grief. | Critics divided over whether 9/11 deepened the drama or lent a conventional grief story borrowed weight. Sandler’s dramatic performance changed the conversation around him as an actor. 64% critics. | Fans were far warmer: 81% audience score. Sandler’s performance and the friendship between Charlie and Alan became the film’s lasting draw. |
| 6. Zero Dark Thirty — 2012 Kathryn Bigelow Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler | Begins with voices from 9/11 emergency calls and follows the decade-long intelligence hunt culminating in the killing of Osama bin Laden. | Acclaimed and fiercely argued over. Critics praised Bigelow’s procedural filmmaking and Chastain while debate erupted over torture and historical accuracy. 91% critics. | 80% audience score. Viewers responded strongly to its tension, realism and Abbottabad climax, although the torture controversy complicated its reputation. |
| 7. The Reluctant Fundamentalist — 2012 Mira Nair Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Liev Schreiber | Examines the changed experience of a Pakistani man in America before and after September 11. | Its importance lay partly in reversing the camera: post-9/11 America viewed through a Pakistani protagonist. Critics admired Ahmed and the ambition but often found its politics too blunt. 56% critics. | 61% audience score. Admirers responded to its alternate post-9/11 perspective and Ahmed’s performance; others found the political drama heavy-handed. |
| 8. The Space Between — 2010 Travis Fine Melissa Leo, Anthony Keyvan | A grounded flight attendant attempts to get a Pakistani-American boy home after U.S. airspace shuts down on September 11. | A small independent film largely outside the mainstream critical machine. Rotten Tomatoes records only three critic reviews. Reviewers singled out Melissa Leo and its intimate treatment of prejudice and connection. | The audience sample is also small: 56% from 100+ ratings. Viewers split between its performances and touching premise versus complaints that it moves too slowly. |
| 9. Remember Me — 2010 Allen Coulter Robert Pattinson, Emilie de Ravin, Chris Cooper, Pierce Brosnan | What begins as a New York romantic drama reveals in its final minutes that Pattinson’s Tyler is inside the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. | Its ending became the story. Critics sharply debated whether using 9/11 as the film’s final narrative revelation was moving, manipulative or exploitative. The controversy made it one of the clearest examples of the limits critics placed on fictional uses of the attacks. | Audience reaction was considerably warmer than critical reaction. Pattinson’s post-Twilight following embraced the romance and family drama, while the ending remains the element viewers most strongly debate. |
| 10. 25th Hour — 2002 Spike Lee Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper | Not literally about 9/11, but one of cinema’s earliest portraits of post-attack New York: Ground Zero and the altered city are woven directly into Lee’s film. | Its stature grew with time. Later reassessment increasingly treated Lee’s devastated New York as one of cinema’s earliest serious responses to September 11. Roger Ebert later added it to his Great Movies canon. | Ground Zero, Norton’s mirror monologue and Lee’s wounded New York helped turn the movie into a post-9/11 time capsule whose reputation has increased substantially since its release. |
SEPARATE CATEGORY: 9/11 ON FILMED THEATER
| Production | 9/11 Connection | Critical Impact | Audience Reaction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Come From Away — 2021 filmed stage production Christopher Ashley Jenn Colella, Petrina Bromley, De’Lon Grant | Records the Broadway musical about Gander, Newfoundland, where thirty-eight diverted aircraft brought nearly 7,000 passengers after U.S. airspace closed on September 11. The musical is based on the experiences of actual residents and passengers. | The tonal outlier in the 9/11 canon. Instead of reconstructing the towers, hijackings or aftermath of war, it dramatizes what strangers did for one another hundreds of miles away. Critics overwhelmingly embraced the stage work and its filmed version for finding humor and generosity without denying the catastrophe surrounding them. | The show’s audience relationship became part of its identity: Broadway, touring and international productions turned an obscure episode in Gander into one of the best-known civilian stories associated with September 11. The filmed production preserved the original Broadway cast’s performances for a much larger audience. |
*WHY COME FROM AWAY BELONGS APART
Come From Away is the Gander story from Newfoundland when passengers were diverted. And it’s not simply another 9/11 movie; it’s theater captured on film, that retains staging and ensemble construction, as well as the theatrical vocabulary of the Broadway production, rather than a rote translation of the story incorporating conventional film techniques.
BONUS: 9/11 TV — 10, 20 AND 25 YEARS LATER
2011 — TEN YEARS LATER
The 10th anniversary produced a wave of television remembrance when September 11 was still personal memory for virtually every adult American.
| Special / Network | Year | What It Covered |
|---|---|---|
| 9/11: 10 Years Later — CBS | 2011 | Jules and Gédéon Naudet and James Hanlon returned to their landmark 9/11 documentary. Robert De Niro again hosted, with firefighters from the original film reflecting on the decade since the attacks. |
| Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience — CNN | 2011 | Forty people whose lives intersected with September 11 returned to tell what happened to them during the decade afterward. |
| Rebirth — Showtime | 2011 | Followed five people directly affected by 9/11 across nearly ten years, pairing their changing lives with time-lapse photography of reconstruction at Ground Zero. |
| Voices From Inside the Towers — History | 2011 | Reconstructed the experiences of people trapped inside the World Trade Center through telephone calls, recorded messages and survivor testimony. |
| The Days After 9/11 — History | 2011 | Moved beyond the familiar images of the attacks to examine the immediate aftermath and the transformation of American life that followed. |
| Remembrance and Renewal: 10 Years After the 9/11 Attacks — ABC / 20/20 | 2011 | ABC News revisited survivors, families and the national response ten years after the attacks. |
| Making the 9/11 Memorial — History | 2011 | Followed the design and construction of the National September 11 Memorial at Ground Zero as it approached its tenth-anniversary opening. |
| The Twins of the Twin Towers — OWN | 2011 | Examined an unusually specific legacy of the attacks: twins whose twin siblings died on September 11. |
| From the Ground Up — OWN | 2011 | Followed five women widowed when their firefighter husbands died at the World Trade Center and the lives they rebuilt afterward. |
| The Space Between — USA | 2011 broadcast | Melissa Leo stars as a flight attendant stranded after U.S. airspace is closed who attempts to return a Pakistani-American boy to his family. A fictional drama embedded within the tenth-anniversary television cycle. |
The scale: dozens of documentaries, news programs, retrospectives and dramas appeared across American television for the tenth anniversary. The dominant question was still intensely personal: Where were you on September 11, 2001?
2021 — TWENTY YEARS LATER
By twenty years, the camera had pulled backward. The question was no longer only What happened? but How did September 11 scar or heal us?
| Special / Network | Year | What It Covered |
|---|---|---|
| 9/11: One Day in America — National Geographic | 2021 | Six-part, minute-by-minute reconstruction built from extraordinary archival footage and extensive interviews with survivors and first responders. Produced with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. |
| Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror — Netflix | 2021 | Five episodes trace the road to September 11 and then outward through Afghanistan, intelligence failures, American foreign policy and the twenty-year War on Terror. |
| 9/11: Inside the President’s War Room — BBC / Apple TV+ | 2021 | George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and others reconstruct approximately twelve hours inside the government’s response to the attacks. |
| NYC Epicenters 9/11➔2021½ — HBO | 2021 | Spike Lee’s four-part documentary places September 11 inside a larger twenty-year portrait of New York City, stretching through the COVID-19 pandemic. |
| Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11 — MSNBC | 2021 | Survivors revisit video testimony they originally recorded in the months after September 11, allowing the viewer to see memory itself change over twenty years. |
| Rebuilding Hope: The Children of 9/11 — Discovery+ | 2021 | Follows young adults born after their fathers died on September 11—the first generation whose relationship to the attacks began before they were born. |
| No Responders Left Behind — Discovery+ | 2021 | Examines the long fight to obtain recognition, treatment and financial support for first responders suffering illnesses associated with Ground Zero exposure. |
| 9/11: Four Flights — History | 2021 | Returns the focus to American 11, United 175, American 77 and United 93 through the experiences of passengers, flight crews, families and people on the ground. |
| 9/11: I Was There — History | 2021 | Uses eyewitness accounts and personal footage to reconstruct the attacks through the cameras and memories of people who actually experienced them. |
| Come From Away — Apple TV+ | 2021 | Filmed Broadway production about Gander, Newfoundland, where thirty-eight diverted aircraft carrying nearly 7,000 people landed after U.S. airspace was closed. Filmed theater rather than a feature film, but a major twentieth-anniversary screen event. |
The shift: by the twentieth anniversary, television had begun treating 9/11 as both memory and historical consequence—Afghanistan, intelligence, first-responder illness, children born after the attacks and the people whose entire adult lives had unfolded in their aftermath.
2026 — TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER
At twenty-five years, another dividing line appears: September 11 is now an event millions of adults do not remember because they were not yet born.
| Special / Network | Year | What It Covers |
|---|---|---|
| 9/11: Reunited — National Geographic / Disney+ / Hulu | 2026 | Three-part series bringing survivors back together with people who helped or saved them during the attacks. Produced in collaboration with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. |
| Turning Point: Generation 9/11 — Netflix | 2026 | Brian Knappenberger returns to the subject twenty-five years later through people whose lives were formed by September 11 and its consequences—including children who lost parents, journalists, military personnel and Afghans. |
| ABC News 9/11 25th Anniversary Special — ABC / Disney+ / Hulu / National Geographic | 2026 | David Muir, Robin Roberts and Diane Sawyer lead anniversary coverage returning to survivors, victims’ families and children who grew up in the shadow of the attacks. |
| Dateline 9/11 Special — NBC | 2026 | Lester Holt revisits people first captured by NBC’s cameras on September 11 and follows their lives twenty-five years later, supplemented by archival material. |
| Born on 9/11: 25 Years with Harris Faulkner — Fox Nation | 2026 | Turns the anniversary chronology upside down by following Americans born on September 11, 2001, who reach their twenty-fifth birthdays on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks. |
| Paul Mauro’s Notes from Ground Zero — Fox Nation | 2026 | Former NYPD Inspector Paul Mauro returns with notes, photographs and video made during the aftermath and reunites with officers who experienced Ground Zero firsthand. |
| 102 Minutes: Inside the Towers — Sky History | 2026 | Reconstructs what happened inside the World Trade Center through survivor testimony, including the experience of North Tower survivor Rob Chess. |
| Robin Roberts Presents: Angel in the Rubble — Lifetime | 2026 | Sherri Shepherd portrays Genelle Guzman, the last survivor pulled alive from the World Trade Center rubble, in a dramatization based on Guzman’s memoir. |
THREE ANNIVERSARIES, THREE DIFFERENT QUESTIONS
2011 — MEMORY: Where were you?
2021 — CONSEQUENCE: How did September 11 scar or heal us?
2026 — HISTORY: How do you recall something you never personally endured?
[Screenmancer Staff Research Dept.]
Among the most poignant questions about 9/11 related to our collective memory is: do we agree on the pictures we all remember. How many of us knew about Betty Ann Ong, and her Betty Ann Ong Foundation now in San Francisco before today? Most of the survivors we know, some we will never know. Yet every one of them tells an American story.
Movies help us remember the bigger picture. Even the most heart-rending pictures seared into our brains.
Support your 9/11 charities and enjoy these films.
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