Metacritic reviews

You don't just watch Titanic, you experience it.

With the ship, with its totality of people, Cameron is wizardly, creating an entire society threading through the various strata of a world that has been set afloat from the rest of the world. [Jan. 5, 1998]

A heart-tugging potboiler that is at once poetic, tragic and cold as steel.

It leaves the port of enterprise and arrives on the far shore of art.

It's a powerfully ersatz experience, but at least it's powerful. There's a lot to like here: At three hours and 14 minutes, the film takes longer to watch than the Titanic took to sink.

The first half drags a bit, but the adventure scenes are exciting and the visual effects are as dazzling as Hollywood's most advanced technology can make them. Focusing as much on time and memory as on danger and disaster, it's an epic with a heart.

Technically, Titanic is a marvel.

This movie should have blown us out of the water. Instead we catch ourselves occasionally thinking the unpardonable thought: "OK, sink already."

The last hour of Titanic is huge and staggering, but there's no horror in it. No gravity, either. Entrusted with one of the century's monumental stories, Cameron can present it only as a crying shame. And that's a crying shame.

No amount of excellent period costuming and brilliant set decoration can substitute for a good story and decent acting.