Kursk

August 2000, the Barents Sea. A torpedo malfunction causes an explosion aboard the Russian submarine Kursk and the boat goes down. Twenty-three men survive in the rear compartment and wait to be rescued. On the surface something else is being managed: the Russian navy is slow to accept foreign help, British and Norwegian teams are kept waiting and the families are kept in the dark. Thomas Vinterberg directed, from Robert Moore's book A Time to Die, with a screenplay by Robert Rodat. Matthias Schoenaerts plays an officer aboard the submarine and Colin Firth plays a British commander. Anthony Dod Mantle photographed it and Alexandre Desplat wrote the score. The budget was 40 million dollars, making it one of the largest productions in Belgian cinema. It was shot in France, Belgium and Norway in 2017. It premiered at Toronto in September 2018 and was released in the United States in June 2019 through Saban Films. The box office stopped at roughly 6.8 million dollars. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 72 percent and Metacritic at 55; the reviews were mixed. It was the last film released in Max von Sydow's lifetime. Who it is for: viewers who like true disaster accounts and confined tension. Who it is not for: anyone with a fear of drowning or of closed spaces. The film stays inside the submarine a long time and gives you no way out.