THE TRUMAN SHOW (1998)

THE TRUMAN SHOW (PG) A beautifully sinister and transfixing entertainment-age daydream. Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) lives in a storybook community called Seahaven that's actually a giant domed television studio. Everywhere he looks, he's being filmed, observed, scrutinized; even his loved ones are actors, equipped with tiny cameras. Only he doesn't know it. The paranoid ingeniousness of The Truman Show brings to mind David Lynch directing a smiley-faced 1984. What makes the film a dizzy, transporting experience is the way that director Peter Weir, working from Andrew Niccol's script, allows us intimate access to the eerie virtual reality of Truman's world, which is portrayed as a hyper-clear dream of our own homogenized, theme-parked lives. Carrey turns Truman into a postmodern Capra hero. Watching the film, we're desperate for Truman to break through Seahaven's fourth wall -- to become, for the first time, himself. A