The Quake

Should be required viewing for all of today's Hollywood franchise jockeys. It shows you how to make one of these things without sacrificing your characters' souls (or your own, for that matter).

For the more open-minded, The Quake offers visceral thrills.

Andersen shows he's assertively capable of staging scenes of mass-destruction on a relatively minimal budget... with thrilling aplomb.

The Quake isn't your standard catastrophe drama, even if it does leave viewers shaking in their boots.

There are fewer special effects shots than we'd see in a Hollywood version, but they are shrewdly deployed and suitably unsettling.

It's just intelligent and serious enough to give you your escapist cake - deluxe popcorn perils in all their big-screen glory - without making you eat the familiar guilt of empty-calorie overload.

...an often excessively deliberate drama...

It's tense and thrilling, epic and terrifying, and delivers spectacle level action and deeply personal stakes.

The makers of The Quake have to contend with the clichés of natural-disaster movies. They largely succeed, in an emotionally complex drama that should resonate with Californians reeling from months of fires and floods.

It works so well because of this focus and its willingness to set the events within confined parameters.