Mr. Eastwood’s filmmaking is expedient (no fuss, no muss), detailed and distinguished by sudden beauty, as when Sully, after the accident, stands alone while framed against the wintry lead-gray sky out of which he just fell. Mr. Eastwood is a musician, and he plays with the story’s competing moods and rhythms with suppleness, setting one scene to the steady beat of everyday life, only to amp another until it races like a thudding heart. The accident, which remains unnervingly in the register of the real, is a master class in direction, as the reassuring engine hum gives way to a spooky near-silence that’s soon punctured by gasps, cries and terrifying shouts: “Brace, brace! Heads down, stay down!” 
 
 “Sully” is a portrait of a hero — Mr. Sullenberger’s decision to land the plane on the Hudson helped save 155 lives, his own included — but one who, after the accident, is troubled both by what might have been (death, destruction) and by an unassuming man’s discomfort with the spotlight. Sully isn’t cut along the cynically frayed lines of assorted current screen heroes, with their nihilism lite and butchery, nor does he fit the existential mode, the man in revolt, like Jason Bourne. Sully is hewed from more classical stuff; he’s the hero whose dignity, as Lionel Trilling wrote, “is wholly manifest in word and deed, in physique and comportment.” Yet Sully is also very much alone, separated by ability and character, as well as by all the directorial choices that isolate him. 
 
 Heroism has long been one of Mr. Eastwood’s themes as an actor and a director, though his portraits tend to be complicated by an annihilating violence often unthinkable in the classical Hollywood days. Draped in black, as if swathed in mourning crepe, some of his most memorable later movies explore the tragic consequences of violence, which runs through communities and individuals alike. They’re profoundly, sometimes uncomfortably, American testaments. By contrast, there’s no tragedy in “Sully,” just sighs of relief, probing questions and an outwardly uncomplicated hero whose extraordinariness is so deeply imbued that it is finally the most ordinary thing about him. You might think that Mr. Eastwood had mellowed, but the very singularity of this movie’s hero suggests otherwise. ||||| 
 
 Tom Hanks stars as hero pilot Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger in “Sully,” a film directed by Clint Eastwood. (Keith Bernstein/Warner Bros. Pictures) 
 
 After a summer of bombast and belly-flops, the fall movie season gets off to a refreshingly sure-footed start with “Sully,” a four-square, upstanding, rock-solid example of filmmaking at its most direct and honestly affecting. 
 
 Tom Hanks plays Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who landed a plane bound from LaGuardia airport to Charlotte on the Hudson River in 2009, after his craft was struck by a flock of Canada geese. But this is no simplistic tale of heroism and crack timing — although they’re in there. Instead “Sully,” which Clint Eastwood directed from a script by Todd Komarnicki, introduces viewers to a man wracked by second thoughts and nightmare visions of what could have happened had he made the wrong decision. What’s more, he’s not the only one with doubts: The film’s framing device is an investigation held by the National Transportation Safety Board, whose extensive simulations and computer algorithms suggested that Sullenberger probably had the engine power and time to make a safe landing back at LaGuardia, or in New Jersey. 
 
 For audiences whose image of Sullenberger is the paragon of modesty and skill, aw-shucks-ing it through interviews with Katie Couric and David Letterman, this part of his story will come as a revelation, and an infuriating one at that: It seems impossible that anyone could second-guess a pilot whose 40-year career was so exemplary that he was known in the field as a safety expert. This alternative glimpse, as well as Eastwood’s graceful staging of Sully’s darkest what-if fantasies, as well as the landing itself, makes “Sully” thoroughly engrossing and exciting to watch, even though viewers know the outcome. 
 
 
 
 Sullenberger flies with first officer Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart), left. (Warner Bros. Pictures) 
 
 Sporting a head of cropped white hair and a modest mustache, his face a sallow mask of discomfort with sudden fame and attention, Hanks is the perfect actor to play Sullenberger, whose reserve and low-key assuredness may remind the audience of the title character the actor played a few years ago in “Captain Phillips.” There are laughs to be had in “Sully,” especially in the banter between Sullenberger and first officer Jeff Skiles, played with bristling, barely contained energy by Aaron Eckhart. But there’s nothing gratuitously ingratiating in a movie that instead goes to great pains to adopt the terse, economical work ethic of its protagonist. (Sully joins Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager and Ed Harris’s John Glenn in the pantheon of cinematic air heroes: taciturn, inherently trustworthy men of action, not showboating.) 
 
 Beautifully filmed in and around a wintry Manhattan, and featuring spectacular sequences re-creating that iconic landing and rescue on Jan. 15, “Sully” is also suffused with a particularly mournful sense of poignancy; the sight of a plane coming so perilously close to the buildings along the Upper West Side can’t help but conjure the city’s most grievous day eight years earlier, an observation made late in the film by one of Sully’s colleagues. (New York deserves a happy ending, he tells him, especially one involving planes.) 
 
 It’s fitting that “Sully” is arriving in theaters on the 15th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, a date that hovers around the proceedings like a tender, ghostly presence. Eastwood and his team not only pay fitting homage to Sullenberger, but to the squads of first responders who did their jobs so heroically on both days. “Sully” is a classy, enormously satisfying ode to simple competence. To paraphrase the title character, it’s just a movie doing its job. And amen to that. ||||| ‘Sully’: Brace for emotional impact of Tom Hanks’ cockpit triumph 
 
 It remains one of the indelible images of the 21st century. 
 
 On a frigid January morning in 2009, dozens of passengers found themselves perched on the wings of US Airways Flight 1549 — in the Hudson River. 
 
 Well. ON the Hudson River. 
 
 Just a few minutes after takeoff, the plane was struck by a flock of Canadian geese, rendering both engines powerless and necessitating a return to LaGuardia Airport — but when it was determined there wasn’t enough time to reach LaGuardia or any other nearby runway, the plane made an emergency crash landing on the water, and miraculously, all 155 passengers and crew survived. 
 
 At the helm of Flight 1549 was one Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who within 24 hours became one of the most famous American pilots this side of Charles Lindbergh. 
 
 It seems almost a foregone conclusion Clint Eastwood would direct and Tom Hanks would star in the movie version of the story. (Can you think of a better starting battery? I can’t.) 
 
 As accomplished as they are, it would be an understatement to say Eastwood and Hanks meet expectations. This isn’t just a solid piece of work; it’s resonant. 
 
 The 86-year-old Eastwood gives us an electrifying thriller, a wonderful in-depth character study and a fascinating airline safety procedural, while Hanks delivers another in a long line of memorable, nomination-worthy performances. 
 
 (Sidebar: How is it Tom Hanks hasn’t been nominated for an Oscar since 2001 with “Castaway”? Could it be the Academy has fallen into a pattern of taking his comfortable, outwardly effortless genius for granted?) 
 
 “Sully” begins with the immediate aftermath of the water landing, with Hanks’ Sully and his co-pilot, Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart in one of his most measured and authentic performances), seemingly barely dried off being soaked in the icy waters of the Hudson when they have to face down a skeptical group of inquisitors from the National Transportation Safety Board, including Mike O’Malley as Charles Porter and Anna Gunn from “Breaking Bad” as Dr. Elizabeth Davis. 
 
 From the get-go, it’s clear some on the panel believe Sully might have panicked and actually had enough engine power and enough altitude and time to get back to an airport. They ask Sully questions about how much sleep he had before the flight, when he had his last drink — and if he was experiencing any problems at home. 
 
 They’re looking for chinks in the armor of a man who was already being hailed as a hero in the media and who seemed a bit uncomfortable under the lights, but didn’t say no to David Letterman or Katie Couric or plenty of other interview opportunities. 
 
 Eastwood directs with his usual economical style. (Even his longest-running films rarely seem to waste our time with overlong scenes of exposition, or unnecessary supporting characters.) We learn a little about Sully’s love of piloting and his resourcefulness in times of crisis via a couple of flashback scenes, and we’re introduced to a handful of flight attendants and rather thinly sketched passengers, including two adult sons and their beloved old pops, a young woman with a baby and a grown woman and her elderly mother. 
 
 Mostly, though, “Sully” is about Sully. Hanks is so good he could play this character in a one-man show with nothing but a chair and a telephone onstage and it would be riveting. 
 
 On the surface, Sully is a calm, cool, no-nonsense, self-effacing veteran of some 42 years as a pilot. But in the aftermath of the landing, he has visions of the plane smashing into Manhattan buildings, he has dreams of news reporters questioning his judgment, and he confesses his doubts and fears in intimate telephone conversations with his wife Lorraine (Laura Linney, who spends nearly every second of her screen time on the phone with Sully). 
 
 Eventually, at just the right time, “Sully” takes us through those harrowing, incredible 208 seconds when Flight 1549 is struck by those birds, and the engines burst into flames before dying out, and Sully and Skiles react in the cockpit, and the flight attendants repeatedly command, “Heads down, stay down, heads down, stay down!” and a commercial aircraft rapidly sinks in the skies above New York City (of all places) and eventually splashes down on the Hudson. 
 
 The editing and the special effects and the performances are so pitch-perfect, this is as close as you’d ever want to come to being on that flight on that January day. 
 
 “Sully” is an absolute triumph. 
 
 ★★★★ 
 
 Warner Bros. Pictures presents a film directed by Clint Eastwood and written by Todd Komarnicki, based on the book “Highest Duty” by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Running time: 95 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for some peril and brief strong language). Opens Friday at local theaters.
– Sure, there was plenty of "hero sex," but the aftermath of the Miracle on the Hudson wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. It's that story Clint Eastwood has chosen to tell in Sully, starring Tom Hanks as pilot Chesley Sullenberger. Here's what critics are saying: Richard Roeper at the Chicago Sun-Times calls it "an absolute triumph." It's "an electrifying thriller, a wonderful in-depth character study and a fascinating airline safety procedural." Hanks, meanwhile, "is so good he could play this character in a one-man show with nothing but a chair and a telephone onstage and it would be riveting." "That it unnerves you as much as it does may seem surprising, given that going in, we know how this story ends." But Eastwood is "very good at his job, a talent that gives the movie its tension along with an autobiographical sheen," writes Manohla Dargis at the New York Times. In particular, he offers "a master class in direction" during the accident scene, while Hanks makes a perfect Sully. Stephen Whitty at NJ.com says the accident scene is "the best part of the film," but he's not so enthralled with the rest of it. Basically, he concludes "there's not enough story" to warrant a feature-length film. Flashbacks to Sully's youth "add nothing but time," while the National Transportation Board Safety Board investigation delivers no drama or suspense, he adds. Ann Hornaday doesn't agree. Sully is "a four-square, upstanding, rock-solid example of filmmaking at its most direct and honestly affecting," and is "thoroughly engrossing and exciting to watch," she writes at the Washington Post. "To paraphrase the title character, it's just a movie doing its job. And amen to that."