DEEPWATER HORIZON

PG-13, 107 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic. Starts tonight at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Anyone looking for a nuanced, serious exploration of either the environmental, political and economic fallout from the explosive Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010 — the largest oil spill and worst ecological disaster in U.S. history — or the corporate culture that contributed to it probably should avoid “Deepwater Horizon,” the film that dramatizes the hours leading up to and during the incident in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people. But as an effects-driven disaster movie starring two totems of testosterone — Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell — and directed by Peter Berg (“Lone Survivor,” “Friday Night Lights”), “Deepwater Horizon” is alarmingly effective. Berg and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan (“World War Z,” “State of Play”) and Matthew Sand (“Ninja Assassin”) may have sacrificed subtlety for spectacle but, in this case, it turns out not to be such a bad trade. Wahlberg is Mike Williams, the real-life chief electronics technician who saved several lives on the evening of April 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon oil-rig exploded like a bomb. But we meet him several hours before that on the mainland when he’s playing with his young daughter (Stella Allen) and his wife, Felicia (Kate Hudson). He’s just one of several characters whose lives are going to collide that night, including crew chief Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell), who gets presented with a workplace safety award just before everything goes south, and bottom-line obsessed BP exec Donald Vidrine (John Malkovich). If Mike and Jimmy represent an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay and all that’s good in the world that the phrase implies, sniveling Donald is a stand-in for its opposite: corporate penny-pinching, cost-cutting and profit-seeking to the point of putting lives at risk. No doubt, if Berg could have found a way to have him tying a damsel-in-distress onto train tracks on the top of an oil platform, he would have. So when Donald ignores Jimmy’s stern advice not to proceed with work because a certain test wasn’t done — they’re 43 days behind schedule after all! — the audience probably should put off any bathroom breaks or snack-bar runs. Because everyone knows what’s coming — and it is spectacular. — Cary Darling, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

QUEEN OF KATWE

PG, 124 minutes. Starts Friday at Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Westbrook, Lisbon. The van in which chess coach Robert Katende shuttles his charges has a sticker on the back reading “challenges are not a curse.” It’s a message that’s oft reiterated throughout the inspiring “Queen of Katwe,” directed by Mira Nair. The inspiring true story of a young girl from the Ugandan slums who became a chess champion and grand master has many of the same gentle and profound truisms that would make apt bumper stickers. It’s all in line with the uplifting and emotional story rendered with a lively vibrancy by Nair and her stars, Lupita Nyong’o, David Oyelowo and newcomer Madina Nalwanga. “Queen of Katwe” tells the story of Phiona Mutesi, a teenage girl raised in the slums of Katwe in Kampala, Uganda, whose prodigious gift for chess, despite a lack of formal education, raises her family out of poverty and abjection. Phiona and her brother Brian (Martin Kabanza) work to make money, selling maize in the market and on the streets, until they are drawn in by altruistic Robert (Oyelowo), who teaches the local children to play chess. Phiona is