Deepwater Horizon

Director Peter Berg manages to serve a diverse set of masters with Deepwater Horizon, paying tribute to the facts without betraying his duties as an entertainer, and laying the blame on money-grubbing oil executives (mostly personified by an ooze-dripping John Malkovich) without turning the film into a seminar. Mark Wahlberg stars as Mike Williams, a worker on the offshore rig that exploded in 2010 due to lax safety oversight by BP. Kurt Russell provides sturdy support as the gruffly noble rig manager Jimmy Harrell, while Kate Hudson serves the underdeveloped part of Mike’s wife Felicia Williams well enough. Since Deepwater Horizon focuses on the terrifyingly immersive experience of being aboard the oil rig as it transformed into a shrapnel-spitting inferno, the devastating environmental impacts of the explosion get relegated to an end-credits footnote. Instead of telling us something that we already know, Berg shows us something that we’ve never seen. D.B.