With the release and box office success of Twisters, attention is once again focused on the disaster movie genre. Here is a selection of films for the nights and weekends ahead - some fact-based, others wholly fictitious, and all deserving of your time.
1) Society of the Snow (2023)
The story of the October 1972 Andes flight disaster - previously recounted in Frank Marshall's Alive in 1993 - was Spain's entry for this year's Best International Feature Film Oscar. Making fast work of its near-two-and-a-half-hour running time and starring a great cast of unfamiliar faces, Society of the Snow grips you from the off and doesn't let go - even after the end credits. Behind the lens is Juan Antonio Bayona, director of the Naomi Watts-starring tsunami drama The Impossible, and he's working at the peak of his powers here, unflinching in his depiction of what was needed to survive. The film closes with the exhortation to keep taking care of each other; True North will be easier to find after watching.
2) Take Shelter (2011)
Impending doom finds its prepper point man in Michael Shannon as his long-time director Jeff Nichols (The Bikeriders, Loving, Midnight Special, Mud) turns up the heat on the pressure cooker of life as we know it. Take Shelter sees construction worker Curtis LaForche (Shannon) plagued by apocalyptic nightmares. Now, has Curtis tapped into something elemental, or is he showing symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, just as his mother did at around the same age? This film is slow to get going, but Shannon's performance is unmissable; nominated for Oscars for Nocturnal Animals and Revolutionary Road, he should have also received a nod for his work here. There's excellent support from future Oscar winner Jessica Chastain as Curtis's heroic other half Samantha. Like the viewer, she's clinging on to the hope that everything will work out right in the end...
3) Deepwater Horizon (2016)
To tell the real-life story of the 2010 drilling rig explosion off the Louisiana coast, Mark Wahlberg reunited with Lone Survivor director Peter Berg. Kurt Russell, Kate Hudson, and John Malkovich also signed up, but such is Deepwater Horizon's docudrama feel that the character development and star wattage are turned way down. Berg brilliantly builds up the tension on the "well from hell" as events unfold - nothing seems to work, the grafters are squeezed ever harder by their paymasters, and a giant workplace becomes more claustrophobic by the minute. The sense of dread is stomach-churning and when the well testing turns into full-blown terror, Berg is relentless. Technically, this is a tour de force, but more importantly, it feels like the crew and their sacrifices have been honoured in the right way.
4) The China Syndrome (1979)
Forty-five years on from its original release, The China Syndrome remains a film of today. Jane Fonda is the reporter and Michael Douglas is the cameraman whose scheduled visit to a California nuclear power plant coincides with Jack Lemmon's veteran engineer averting a meltdown. Corners have been cut, a cover-up follows, and our fears grow for the lives of the central trio. Nominated for four Oscars, James Bridges's film ranks with the best of Lemmon, Fonda, and Douglas' storied careers - with Douglas also bringing the thriller to screens as producer. Less than two weeks after The China Syndrome was released in the US, a partial meltdown occurred at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania.
5) A Night to Remember (1958)
Forty years before James Cameron's box office juggernaut, this British classic told the story of the Titanic. Considered one of the most historically accurate films about the events of 15 April 1912, A Night to Remember has aged remarkably well. Made with the co-operation of survivors, it's brilliantly paced, doesn't mess around with melodrama, and has excellent practical effects to complement the close-ups. The much-loved Kenneth More is the perfect choice to lead the cast as Second Officer Charles Lightoller, and he's backed by a cast who receive excellent character beats from director Roy Ward Baker. The next time you're in the mood for Cameron's blockbuster, watch this instead. It won't be a one-off - guaranteed.
6) Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Climate change receives its close-up in this Cannes winner and quadruple Oscar nominee from director Benh Zeitlin - more fantasy than disaster but essential viewing. Survivors of a Hurricane Katrina-like event have ignored the mandatory evacuation order and live in adjoining shacks in 'The Bathtub', the bayou area that 'progress' forgot. Among them is Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis - the youngest ever Best Actress Oscar nominee at age nine years and 135 days) and time spent with her blows the dust off your own sense of wonder and things from childhood. Beasts of the Southern Wild is both a warning about our actions and a tribute to the human spirit, juxtaposing the tough with the tender. Despite all that's wrong in this world, you'll feel elated, not empty when you finish watching it.
7) The Finest Hours (2016)
Mercury Rev's brilliant single Car Wash Hair came with the tagline "For Grandfathers everywhere." It's one Disney should've borrowed for this nautical race against time. If you or someone you know can reel off even one of Gene Hackman's lines from The Poseidon Adventure or Steve McQueen's from The Towering Inferno, then these two hours with Chris Pine and Casey Affleck, while not being the finest, will pass quickly. The film tells the true story of the US Coastguard's 1952 rescue mission to stricken tanker the SS Pendleton off the coast of Massachusetts - a document of derring-do that offers up some excellent CGI, in between the chance to play movie genre bingo. And while director Craig Gillespie and the writers should've done more to flesh out some characters, they fare far better in working in politics and posturing on dry land and the high seas. You thought there was tension in your job? Ah here.
8) Sorcerer (1977)
A disaster when it came out in the same summer as Star Wars, William Friedkin's take on Georges Arnaud's book The Wages of Fear - there's also a must-see 1953 adaptation - is now considered gold. Friedkin's French Connection star Roy Scheider leads a story of desperate men "willing to do a dangerous job". The job? Transporting leaking dynamite 200 miles through the South American jungle to an oil well fire. Here, the terrain, the elements, and the cargo all combine to create a sweat-soaked existential thriller about the will to survive and, as Friedkin described it, "the mystery of fate". After a critical mauling upon release, fate has ultimately proved kind to Sorcerer; more people discover it every year and they tell others, "Wait until you see the scene with the rope bridge." Friedkin, who died in August 2023, said he wouldn't change a frame of his personal favourite. He was right all along.
9) Only the Brave (2017)
The Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona in June 2013 claimed the lives of 19 firefighters from the state's Granite Mountain Hotshots - the largest loss of life of emergency service personnel in the US since 11 September. From the off, Only the Brave director Joseph Kosinski conveys the men's devotion to their local area and vice versa. It's a testament to the A-list cast - Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges among them - that you forget you are watching the actors and are completely invested in the people they are portraying. In terms of depicting dedication, camaraderie, the push and pull of family life, and the fear of the next call-out, Only the Brave is powerful in its poignancy. Ultimately, this film is about love and friendship rather than the tragedy itself.
10) Threads (1984)
The BBC's landmark depiction of nuclear war and its aftermath was first shown on BBC Two in October 1984. It was repeated on BBC One in August 1985 to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Sheffield-set Threads has not been shown on either channel since. Indeed, it would be 2003 before the BBC aired it again, this time on BBC Four. Directed by Mick Jackson, who would later go on to The Bodyguard and Volcano in Hollywood, this relentless docudrama haunted a generation, then, now, and forever the most terrifying film ever made. If that seems like hyperbole, see if you make it to the end. Speaking to The Atomic Hobo podcast in 2021, Jackson said: "This isn't a film about history, this is a film about now." At the time of the interview, the Doomsday Clock was at 100 seconds. It's now at 90.
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