There’s a great performance at the center of Sully, Clint Eastwood’s film about Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who miraculously landed a US Airways jet loaded with 155 passengers and crew in the middle of the Hudson River on a frigid January day fifteen years ago and did not lose a single soul in the process. That performance is, of course, by Tom Hanks as Sully, a white-haired reserve of composure and practicality who almost never loses his cool even when he’s attempting an unprecedented water landing. Underneath that calm exterior, however, Sully is roiled by self-doubt after the incident: could he have done it differently? Could he have made it to one of the nearby airports as instructed?

He’s also plagued by nightmares in which he doesn’t make it and the plane plows into skyscrapers along the Manhattan skyline, an unsettling image which Eastwood deploys over and over again. The idea is that New York found a kind of healing in Sully’s achievement, some eight years after 9/11, with a character saying at one point, “It’s been a while since New York had news this good — especially with an airplane in it.” It’s a message that’s especially moving during the film’s single best segment after the landing itself — an extended sequence in which New York workers from a ferry captain to first responders make their way into the icy waters of the Hudson and rescue the passengers as the plane slowly disappears below the surface.