The Truman Show

Released June 5, 1998 and directed by Peter Weir from a screenplay by Andrew Niccol, The Truman Show gave Jim Carrey — until then known almost entirely for rubber-faced comedy — his first major dramatic role. He plays Truman Burbank, who has unknowingly lived his entire life inside "Seahaven," an enormous domed soundstage, as the unwitting star of a round-the-clock television program. Ed Harris plays Christof, the show's godlike creator, directing Truman's world from a control room hidden in the artificial moon.

The film builds from Truman's small daily glitches — a studio light falling out of the "sky," a car radio that accidentally narrates his movements — toward his growing suspicion and his eventual attempt to escape by sea. Laura Linney plays his product-placement-spouting wife Meryl, Noah Emmerich his best friend Marlon, and Natascha McElhone the woman who tries to tell him the truth. Weir frames much of it through the in-universe hidden cameras, quietly making the audience complicit with the show's vast worldwide viewership.

Critics embraced it — 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 90 on Metacritic — and it earned three Academy Award nominations: Best Director for Weir, Best Supporting Actor for Harris, and Best Original Screenplay for Niccol, though it won none. It grossed $264.1 million worldwide against a $60 million budget.

Its cultural afterlife outgrew the box office. As reality television exploded in the 2000s, The Truman Show came to look less like satire than prophecy, and by 2008 the term "Truman Show delusion" had been coined for patients convinced their own lives were secretly being filmed.