Titanic

It's $200 million-plus worth of old-fashioned melodrama in a state-of-the-art package. It's both the shortest 3 1/2 hours you'll ever spend at the movies and spectacle of such magnitude that it's hard to imagine feeling you didn't get your time and money's worth.

It begins with eerie underwater images of the Titanic's remains, resting beneath the Atlantic since its close encounter with an iceberg in 1912. The footage comes courtesy of a salvage expedition led by Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton), whose hidden purpose is to recover a fabulous blue diamond. The gem was bought by caddish roue Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) for his fiancee Rose (Kate Winslet), and apparently...