Phone Booth (2003)

A lifetime of little lies can catch up with you in the most terrifying way, and this time, on the other end of a phone line. Joel Schumacher's thriller "Phone Booth," written by Larry Cohen, stars Colin Farrell as Stu Shepard, a slick, self-absorbed New York publicist who uses a pay phone in Midtown Manhattan every day to call Pam (Katie Holmes), a young aspiring actress he's pursuing behind the back of his wife, Kelly (Radha Mitchell), so the calls won't show up on his cellphone bill. One afternoon, as he hangs up, the phone rings. The caller (Kiefer Sutherland) has been watching him, has a high-powered rifle trained on him from somewhere above and warns that if Stu hangs up, he dies. When a man who's been harassing Stu is shot dead, the police, led by a shrewd captain (Forest Whitaker), assume Stu is the killer and surround the booth, while crowds and TV cameras gather. Pinned inside, Stu must find a way to secretly signal the truth to the police, as the unseen sniper forces him to publicly confess his deceptions to both his wife and Pam. Unfolding in nearly real time over roughly 80 tense minutes, it's a gripping battle of wits and a clever study of a man stripped of his lies.