In the Heart of the Sea

In the winter of 1820, the New England whaling ship Essex is assaulted by something no one could believe—a whale of mammoth size and will, and an almost human sense of vengeance.

Ron Howard's maritime survival epic lands with critics as a visually impressive but dramatically hollow endeavor — the spectacle works, the emotional weight largely doesn't. Audiences were more forgiving than critics, suggesting the film's old-fashioned adventure energy plays better as a crowd-pleaser than as serious Oscar fare. The central problem most critics identified: the film reaches for the mythic grandeur of its source material but never quite gets there.