Part religious parable, part disaster movie, all superior entertainment: an all-star cast tries to lead us to safety after their luxury liner has been overturned by a tsunami. Gene Hackman plays a doubting clergyman who leads a party of desperate, odds-playing survivors through a maze-like wreckage of flooded corridors. Starring Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Roddy McDowall, and, as the hapless captain, Leslie Nielsen (who would later fondly lampoon his role in Airplane!).

“The technology and the ingenuity of survival are what fascinate us in Ark Movies, especially survival after some spectacularly dreadful sequence of events that has effectively eliminated all of the non-speaking roles and a lot of the other no-quite-anonymous actors. … The Poseidon Adventure puts the Ark Movie back where God intended it to be: in the water.”
—Vincent Canby, The New York Times