9 movies that best capture the mood of 9/11

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Set us as preferred “It felt like a movie” — that’s what we all said in the days and weeks after Sept.11, 2001, when a Michael Bay action film slammed uncomfortably into real life.

But with the perspective of 25 years, what’s lingered for the most part aren’t the most literal depictions of the day, but oblique dramas that capture something more subtle: the free-floating anxiety of a nightmare.In our list, you’ll find titles that confront Sept.

11 directly, but others that bring to mind a deeper, broader canon of trauma.Going to the movies in the fall of 2001 was a solace and escape for many New Yorkers, though the films themselves often had an eerie, unplanned timeliness that made them resonate in an unshakable way.You could ache for the cozy city of the past in “The Royal Tenenbaums” or grabble with the schism of everything suddenly feeling different in “Mulholland Drive.” Or you could envelop yourself in Richard Kelly’s moody “Donnie Darko,” a teen drama touched by metaphysical doominess in which plane engines fall from the sky and death wears a rabbit costume.

The movie has since become an unexplainable piece of comfort for a spooked generation.In its weather, its soundtrack and the haunted stare of Jake Gyllenhaal, it evokes the weeks after 9/11, even if it anticipated them.

— Joshua RothkopfOnly months after the attacks, Spike Lee took on 9/11 with a boldness that only 15 years of provocative filmmaking — and a lifetime of loving New York — could sharpen into an artist.This interpersonal drama, about the fallout of a drug dealer (Edward Norton) going to prison, was deep in development when real-life events altered its trajectory.

Lee insisted on including the American flags dotting lawns, the general sense of unease and, in a somber touch, a credits sequence featuring the Tribute in L...