disaster

[6] Pierce Brosnan (Goldeneye) and Linda Hamilton (Terminator 2) star in this old-fashioned disaster flick about a volcano that’s about to wipe a small town off the map. Brosnan plays a volcanologist who, in Jaws-like fashion, warns the town of impending doom after discovering a pair of hot spring bathers boiled alive. His boss (The Thing‘s Charles Hallahan), however, doesn’t want to freak out the …

[7] Following in the tradition of Irwin Allen disaster movies like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure comes this tornadic thrill ride from director Jan de Bont (Speed). Helen Hunt (As Good As It Gets) and Bill Paxton (Frailty) star as estranged scientists who fall back in love with each other while chasing tornadoes during an especially stormy couple of days in Oklahoma. Their …

[7] Gerard Butler (300) and Morena Maccarin (Firefly) star in this end-times thriller about a family trying to find shelter before a comet smashes into Earth. We’ve seen this plot play out in movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact, but Greenland distinguishes itself by its psychological focus on the two main characters. There are, of course, visual effects depicting destruction and devastation, and harrowing crowd …

[3] Sylvester Stallone tries to save a group of people trapped in a collapsed New York tunnel in this actioner from director Rob Cohen (Dragonheart, The Fast and the Furious). Daylight is a throwback to Irwin Allen disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, with the motley group of survivors battling shaky ground, rolling flames, and gushing water — not to mention …

[7] Citizens of Kansas City, Missouri, experience nuclear attack and radioactive fall-out in this horrific drama helmed by director Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan, Time After Time). Two-time Oscar winner Jason Robards leads the ensemble cast as a doctor who can barely maintain order at a hospital overwhelmed by incoming patients. The story is also told from the perspective of a …

[7] Director Alexandre Aja (High Tension) serves up a father/daughter survival thriller that takes place primarily in a basement full of alligators during a hurricane. Sound preposterous? Well, that’s part of the charm. But Aja and screenwriters Michael and Shawn Rasmussen give the tale enough verisimilitude to suck you in and make you root for these people — and their dog, too. Kaya Scodelario and …

[6] Kate Winslet and Idris Elba star as survivors of a small plane crash who must brave snowy mountain terrain and try to stay alive long enough to find help. I was in the mood for a survival flick when I settled in for The Mountain Between Us, but the film barely delivers the goods on that mark. No, it’s very much a romance movie. …

[5] Modern-day pirates try to rob a cruise ship at sea only to discover that tentacles creatures from the ocean depths have already claimed the ship’s crew. Deep Rising is a shake-and-bake assembly of Alien and The Poseidon Adventure that pales in comparison to either of those greater movies, but if you’re hard up for some genre thrills, it might do the trick for you. …

[6] Decades before James Cameron sank the Titanic and twelve years before Irwin Allen took us on The Poseidon Adventure, writer/director Andrew L. Stone took a pioneering step into the disaster film genre. While Cameron and Allen certainly had more pyrotechnics at their disposal, Stone does a remarkable job utilizing a real luxury liner and building suspense throughout The Last Voyage‘s brisk 91-minute run-time. In …

[2] A giant radioactive lizard terrorizes New York City. There are probably at least 100 different ways this could have been more interesting and exciting, but producers Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) instead opt to make their Godzilla movie two hours and twenty minutes of  implausible, joyless tedium. The characters (if you could call them that) have no spunk, no personality, nothing to …

1 2 3 4