Titanic
1997
****
Director: James Cameron
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Danny Nucci, Bill Paxton, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, David Warner
Jack Dawson is a poor but talented artist and Rose DeWitt Bukater is an aristocratic woman who is about to marry to wealth. These two young people meet and fall in love during the maiden voyage of R.M.S. Titanic. James Cameron uses the ship's tragic sinking as a backdrop for a fictional love story, and the resulting romantic disaster movie became the biggest box office hit of all time and won 11 Academy Awards. It's a long but entertaining epic, and the massive budget is all up on the screen as amazing special effects. However, the characters are disappointingly one-dimensional (poor people: good, rich people: bad, rich love rival: pure evil), the dialogue is clunky, and the outcome of the drama is a foregone conclusion.
