Black Sea

Recently laid off and seething with resentment, a specialist in underwater salvage (Jude Law) is hired by a mysterious backer to captain a dilapidated Soviet-era submarine on a mission to retrieve a fortune in gold from a sunken Nazi sub in the Black Sea. En route he struggles to maintain order and discipline among a motley crew of British and Russian down-and-outers. Director Kevin Macdonald and writer Dennis Kelly craft a relentless, claustrophobic nail-biting thriller, as Murphy's law kicks in and almost everything goes wrong. Macdonald and Kelly rashly invite comparison with Henri-Georges Clouzot's great The Wages of Fear—and incredibly, they pull it off. The tension is nonstop and all but unbearable, marred only by the presence of frequently unintelligible accents, both British and Russian.