Shine
Geoffrey Rush won a Best Actor Oscar for this portrayal of David Helfgott, a young piano prodigy whose hard-driving father eventually propels him into a nervous breakdown. Institutionalized for several years, Helfgott eventually finds love and makes one of those grand, standing-ovation-type comebacks we’ve come to expect in films about broken artists. Predictable turns aside, it’s Rush who dazzles (hah! thought we were going to say “shine,” didn’t you?) as the schizophrenic whose madness, writes TIME critic Richard Corliss, is “a nice mad, not angry or morose.” In other words, crazy, but not crazy crazy.
