You’re gonna need a bigger boat: the 20 best films set on water – ranked!
As L’Atalante is re-released, we count down the best movies set largely on ships, boats, barges, yachts, steamers and trimarans. Submarines banned, as they’re under water
20. Deep Rising (1998)
Stephen Sommers’ sci-fi horror pulp follows a bunch of scene-stealing character actors playing mercenaries hired to destroy the cruise ship Argonautica for insurance purposes. But a giant mutant octopus has got there first! Among the potential cephalopod fodder are Treat Williams, Kevin J O’Connor, and Famke Janssen as a jewel thief.
19. The Legend of 1900 (1998)
A baby, abandoned on the transatlantic liner SS Virginian, grows up to be a gifted pianist (Tim Roth) who never steps off the boat. The highlight of Giuseppe Tornatore’s whimsical hokum is Roth fighting a piano duel with Jelly Roll Morton, rather unfairly depicted as a smug bastard.
18. Waterworld (1995)
Kevin Costner plays a samurai-like drifter with webbed feet and a souped-up trimaran in this megabudget sci-fi B-movie, set in a future where melting polar ice-caps have flooded the planet. Everyone is searching for mythical Dryland while fending off Dennis Hopper and his band of chain-smoking pirates.
17. Titanic (1997)
Two hours of tiresome canoodling between a posh chick (Kate Winslet) and an itinerant yobbo (Leonardo DiCaprio) are redeemed by James Cameron’s spectacular recreation of one the 20th century’s most infamous catastrophes. You have to admire the chutzpah of a film-maker who manages to twist a death toll of 1,500 into an emotionally uplifting tale of emancipation.
16. Ship of Fools (1965)
Peasants, flamenco dancers and Nazi eugenicists rub shoulders on a passenger ship sailing from Mexico to Europe in 1933. Stanley Kramer’s epic features Vivien Leigh, in her final role, as a sad divorcee, but it’s Oskar Werner, as the ship’s doctor, and Simone Signoret, as a radical countess, who provide the film with its emotional wallop.
15. The Last Voyage (1960)
The USS Claridon is ripped apart in an explosion and Robert Stack’s wife (Dorothy Malone) is trapped in their cabin in this gripping proto-disaster pic. Can Stack and a heroic engineer (Woody Strode) save her before the ship sinks? Fun fact: the Claridon is played by the legendary French liner Île de France.
14. Death on the Nile (1978)
Bette Davis and Angela Lansbury are among the murder suspects on board a Nile paddle steamer in this all-star Agatha Christie whodunit. Peter Ustinov, as Hercule Poirot, fails to stop half the cast being stabbed or shot, which whittles down his suspects to a manageable number. Bags more fun than the 2022 remake.
13. Dead Calm (1989)
Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill play a married couple trying to get over the trauma of their son’s death by taking their yacht for a spin in the Pacific, where they rescue Billy Zane from a sinking schooner. Big mistake! Phillip Noyce’s thriller is essentially a slasher movie at sea, but an ultra-classy one that put Kidman on the map.
12. The Maggie (1954)
An Englishman, transporting furniture for an American industrialist, is tricked into hiring a run-down “Clyde puffer” in Alexander Mackendrick’s brutal Ealing comedy in the subversive tradition of his own Whisky Galore! Of course, the boat’s Scottish captain and crew take the two landlubbers for a ride, in all senses of the word.
11. Juggernaut (1974)
Richard Lester gives his disaster thriller a state-of-the-nation tilt in this nerve-shredding yarn of explosives planted on a luxury liner, the SS Britannic. Red wire or blue wire? Richard Harris and David Hemmings play bomb disposal experts; Roy Kinnear, as the ship’s entertainments director, serves up a heartbreaking study in tragicomic desperation.
10. The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
This adaptation of Paul Gallico’s novel is one of the peaks of the 1970s disaster genre. The SS Poseidon is flipped over by a tsunami, and it’s up to Reverend Gene Hackman to lead his flock through the upturned hull to safety. Shelley Winters is unforgettable as a shopkeeper’s wife with a useful history of competitive swimming.
9. All is Lost (2013)
Robert Redford gives a late-career masterclass in solo performance as a man struggling to survive in the Indian Ocean after his yacht, the Virginia Jean, is damaged in a collision with an errant shipping container. It’s stressful enough to watch, so heaven knows how physically gruelling it must have been for the 76-year-old star to film.
8. Captain Phillips (2013)
Tom Hanks does sterling work in one of his regular-guys-under-intolerable-pressure roles, as the captain of an American cargo ship hijacked by Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa. He’s matched by Barkhad Abdi (“I’m the captain now”), making a sensational film debut as the pirate chief in Paul Greengrass’s thriller, based on real events. If the last scene doesn’t make you blub, you’re not human.
7. Triangle (2009)
Freak weather conditions capsize a yacht in Christopher Smith’s terrific Anglo-Australian sci-fi chiller, stranding a frazzled single mother (Melissa George) and her fellow passengers on an abandoned liner in mid-ocean. The timeline gets complicated, so it’s just as well Smith’s plotting is meticulous, anchored by a superb performance from George and capped by a devastating payoff.
6. And the Ship Sails On (1983)
Federico Fellini’s gloriously artificial late-career masterpiece is set on board the Gloria N, sailing from Naples towards a Mediterranean isle where a bunch of opera singers plan to scatter a diva’s ashes. But the real world intrudes in the form of Serbian refugees. Freddie Jones, as a genial but bumbling journalist, is our guide to the onboard shenanigans.
5. Apocalypse Now (1979)
“Never get out of the boat!” Wise words, though bad things happen both on and off the US Navy river patrol boat Erebus as it ferries Captain Willard upriver to Cambodia to terminate Colonel Kurtz’s rogue command “with extreme prejudice” during the Vietnam war. It’s a nightmare journey into the heart of darkness, the title of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 anti-colonial novella that inspired Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius’s screenplay.
4. Lifeboat (1944)
Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime survival drama, adapted from a John Steinbeck novella, is a case study in how to film a handful of characters in a cramped location and keep it thrilling. Among the survivors stranded in a lifeboat after their ship is torpedoed are Tallulah Bankhead, as a journalist who offers her diamond bracelet as fish bait, and Walter Slezak as a sneaky German.
3. Jaws (1975)
The second half of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster moves from dry land to a fishing boat, the Orca, as salty shark expert Quint (Robert Shaw) teams up with a thalassophobic police chief (Roy Scheider) and nerdy ichthyologist (Richard Dreyfuss) to kill the great white maneater terrorising Amity Island. A bigger boat might have been advisable.
2. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany play mismatched nautical chums, Captain Jack Aubrey and nature-loving Dr Stephen Maturin, in Peter Weir’s exemplary conflation of two Patrick O’Brian novels. It’s like a virtual reality immersion in another time and place – on board the HMS Surprise, off the South American coast, during the Napoleonic Wars. Booming cannon, amputation, superstition, sea-shanties and not a single duff note.
1. L’Atalante (1934)
A barge captain brings his new bride back to live on his canal boat in one of cinema’s most sublime flights of visual lyricism. While filming his only full-length feature, Jean Vigo was already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him at the age of 29. The film flopped, and only later became a fixture in greatest films of all time lists. Michel Simon steals all his scenes as cat-loving crew member Père Jules; the BFI put together a supercut called C’atalante.