Five years after four passenger planes were hijacked by Al Queda terrorists on September 11 2001, Hollywood feels it can look the subject in the face.

Lean, harsh and non-judgemental, British director Paul Greengrass's painstaking recreation of the doomed United Airlines flight 93 is the first mainstream film to hit the big screen.

It's going to be difficult for anything that follows to match it for emotional intensity, adrenaline-pumping tension and sheer integrity.

Practically shot in real-time, we follow the crew as they join the San Francisco-bound Boeing 757 and welcome the 44 passengers on board with sunny inquiries about breakfast.

Among them are four Jihadist terrorists who we have already seen chanting the Koran and invoking God as they plan to pilot the hijacked craft into their chosen target - possibly The White House.

As they take their seats, air traffic controllers at Newark are beginning to learn that a number of planes have been taken over and are "dropping like manhole covers."

However, United 93 is up and away and heading east when the terrorists clinically strike, murdering the pilots and a stewardess with craft knives and seizing the controls.

Uncomprehending and disorientated, the passengers learn - via mobiles and maintenance phones - of the World Trade Center attacks... and the certainty their plane is on a suicide mission.

Greengrass makes no attempt to put the action in any sort of context and there's no backstory to any of the victims and their religiously-driven killers.

In fact, while not exactly humanising the terrorists, he allows differing character traits to emerge beyond the barely controlled panic punctuated by bouts of brutal hysteria.

We learn all we need to know from the passengers - the co-pilot's 11-month-old baby - from their idle chit-chat before the attack and the touchingly pathetic messages to loved ones by phone after the jet is seized.

Meanwhile, the air traffic controllers are emerging as heroes of the hour while their military counterparts appear incapable of little more than trotting out gung-ho war-speak with little positive action to back it up.

The last twenty minutes as the passengers take on their captors packs more nailbiting moments of sheer power and impotent rage than any number of recent action blockbusters.

Even as you know the plane is hurtling out of the skies over Pennsylvania, you can't help willing the desperate passengers to battle out a different ending.

It's difficult to take seriously the notion that a film could be a fitting epitaph...but this dignified, focussed and awe-inspiring piece of work does just that.

Tim Evans