Titanic

(Paramount)

Not only does the most expensive movie ever made elevate its special effects with a story, characters, and a point, it also brings to them awe and vision. In flashback we meet the spoiled and desperate American socialite Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet); her mother, Ruth (Frances Fisher), a dowager facing ruin; the impossibly villainous millionaire's son Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), whom Rose is to marry; and the plucky young American Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), an impoverished, itinerant artist who has won steerage passage on the ship in a poker game. The free-spirited Jack and the gilded-caged Rose meet on board, and so on. But where director James Cameron really shines is in showing how the fascination with such technological wonders as the White Star liner and this movie itself is a fascination with the inanimate, with death, and with the dread of what iceberg might lie in the path of our lives and our civilization. With Gloria Stuart as the aged survivor Rose looking back.