Unusually intelligent Jim Carrey movie - a provocative and prescient media satire. Puts Big Brother and the current spate of docu-soaps firmly into perspective

　　 Truman Burbank (Carrey) is a happily married insurance salesman living a normal life in a small American town so perfect that he has never felt the need or desire to leave it. He has a loving wife (Linney), and a loyal best buddy (Emmerich). Life is good until one morning a stage light drops from the skies and shatters on the ground perilously close to him. It is the trigger that sets him questioning everything around him. What is behind the facades of the buildings he has never entered? Why do people seem to be travelling around him in a perfectly synchronized loop? What is going on outside his home-town? Truman is, it turns out, the unwitting star of a top-rated 24-hour-a-day TV docu-soap.

　　 Under the careful critical scrutiny to which it has been subjected, the plot turns out not to be watertight. This is to miss the point of what is a hilarious and breathtakingly conceived satire which also allows Carrey to edge away from broad comedy.

　　 The Truman Show is also oddly moving and has, as you would expect from a Weir film, a pronounced metaphysical slant with Ed Harris playing the show"s archly named producer/creator Christof.
Verdict
One of the cinematic highlights of the 1990s, The Truman Show is up there with Weir"s very best work.