Based on an incident that was officially suppressed for 28 years, K-19: The Widowmaker is a fine addition to the "sub-genre" of submarine thrillers. The first major American film about Russian cold war heroes, it re-creates the nightmare endured in 1961 by the crew of the Soviet nuclear submarine K-19 , when an exposed reactor core nearly resulted in a nuclear catastrophe. Several crewmen died, and K-19 's captain (played by Harrison Ford) had to assert his command … mehrwhen near-mutiny favored his executive officer (Liam Neeson). This escalating tension gives the film its potent dramatic thrust, and both Ford and Neeson deliver intense performances while director Kathryn Bigelow ( Near Dark , Strange Days ) ably controls a sub full of seething testosterone. It's not as viscerally thrilling as the classic Das Boot or U-571 , and some K-19 survivors protested the inclusion of inauthentic drinking scenes, but the movie benefits from grand-scale production values, seamless computer graphics, and a compelling real-life twist. --Jeff Shannon weniger