Crimson Tide (1995)

Few things in cinema are as pleasurable as seeing two towering actors butt heads in a film with a whip-smart script that gives their clash real stakes. The actors have never been better, and the stakes never higher, than they are in Crimson Tide, Tony Scott’s 1995 submarine-set pressure cooker in which a commanding officer (Hackman) and his executive officer (Denzel Washington) clash, with a potential nuclear crisis hanging in the balance. Crimson Tide is irresistibly compelling for so many reasons: the complexity of its lead performances, the circumstances that drive these men to collide, and the intelligence with which it engages with the nuclear threat. As Washington’s character puts it at one point, “In the nuclear world, the true enemy can’t be destroyed…in my humble opinion, in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself.” Hackman is pitch-perfect as the cigar-chomping human embodiment of the opposition to this idea, an old-school navy officer with the capacity to kick off World War III. — Carolyn Petit

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