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The Will Leitch Newsletter is one of the few Substacks I subscribe to, not least because his divergent interests tend to dovetail with mine, and I have appreciated how so far in 2026, he has not shied away from almost always prefacing whatever he wants to write about with addressing the present American outrages. These are extraordinary times in the worst way and acknowledging it does not feel redundant or sanctimonious but like a necessary refusal to normalize. This country has normalized way too damn much in the last decade and such normalization, I would argue, is a huge part of why we are where we are right now. Even so, such brutal preambles can wear a person out, and a few weeks ago, Leitch introduced his latest lament of the nation by writing, “Believe you me: I’d rather be…ranking Kelly Reichardt movies.” The ensuing week he noted that a reader from Saint Paul, Minnesota, epicenter of the current American crisis, wrote to say that he could really use Leitch ranking Kelly Reichardt movies right now. And so, as Leitch wrote, he scrapped his previously planned post about the American media’s coverage of the current President’s quote-unquote movement during the last ten years to instead rank Richard Linklater movies to clear his head.
To my clear head, well, I’m not going to rank Richard Linklater movies or Kelly Reichardt movies. I love them both, but this blog’s brand is a bit more irregular. And because I’ve had the movie year 1995 on my mind recently because of a post I am planning to have coincide with the upcoming Academy Awards, I’m going to rank supporting actors in that year’s action-thriller “Crimson Tide” in which a submarine captain (Gene Hackman) and his XO (Denzel Washington) battle over whether to launch nuclear missiles with war imminent or to find a way to retrieve a half-finished message that might confirm war has been aborted. And though it is made in the image of its legendary two leads, “Crimson Tide” is in the (more than) middling thriller hall of fame because it is chock full of dudes (and one dog).
Ranking Crimson Tide Supporting Performances
9. Eric Bruskotter. The role is a little obvious, a lunkhead on the wrong side of things, but boy, does Bruskotter bring that lunkhead to life.
8. Tommy Bush. At the end, there is a small but critical part requiring an actor with enough stature to make you believe he possesses more authority than Gene freaking Hackman which is why “Crimson Tide” fills it with Jason Robards. (It is also why Robards is ineligible for this list.) But there is another small, if less critical, role near the beginning that also requires someone to appear as if he has more stature than Gene freaking Hackman. So, what are you going to do? You don’t have enough in the budget for another Jason Robards. Credit, then, to casting director Victoria Thomas for choosing a seasoned character actor like Bush, and credit to costume designer George L. Little for putting him in some J.T. Walsh glasses, and for Bush just sort of allowing this broader framework to impress the necessary longstanding authority with doing much of anything at all.
7. Happy Lab. The Jack Russell terrier that is the loyal companion of Hackman’s character gets all the pub, but it’s this dog, as Washington’s canine counterpart, that gets my vote as Best in Show.
6. Danny Nucci. He was something of a going concern in the 90s, as his Wikipedia entry attests, the first sentence under the career tab noting, “During the 1990s, Nucci played characters who are unceremoniously killed off in three blockbuster films – ‘Eraser,’ ‘The Rock,’ and ‘Titanic.’” Ah, but in “Crimson Tide,” he sticks around to the end, and more than that, does a solid job in evincing the small arc of a petty officer who comes into his own.
5. Matt Craven. For a long time there, in the 90s and even into the aughts, any movie that needed an asshole, whatever the variety, Craven was near the front of the rolodex. I was recently rewatching parts of “A Few Good Men” for obvious reasons and there was Craven, called in for one scene to be the livid military lawyer who’s had it up to here with Tom Cruise and he nails it. And he nails the asshole in “Crimson Tide” too. At the end, right when nuclear war is averted, Craven has his character get this get look (see above) that is a little disappointed, like he would have gone to war to be right. That’s the stuff.
4. George Dzundza. More than the other supporting characters, Dzundza’s is written with a sense of ethical and moral complication, and he carries it with great anguish.
3. Marcello Thedford. Yes, reader, you might notice Steve Zahn in the background of this shot, and he is not the only known quantity in a smaller role. There is also Ryan Phillippe, Scott Grimes, and Rick Schroder. None of them, though, leave as big an impression as Thedford. Not just in this pictured moment where he does a little dance-karaoke to Martha and the Vandellas, but in an earlier scene where he expresses true geniality toward the Gandolfini and Mortensen characters right before they have fun with him by dressing him down. There are precious few moments of levity in “Crimson Tide” and quite possibly the two best involve Thedford.
2. James Gandolfini. As with virtually all his pre-“Sopranos” work, you could see Gandolfini already had “it” in “Crimson Tide,” clear as day, by which I mean both an electricity and an intensity. Whether it’s believable behavior for a naval supply officer or not, I don’t really care, but when the stuff hits the fan, I love how he plays the part as something like a sneering prizefighter trying to goad you into throwing a punch after the bell. His single best moment, though, comes before the stuff hits the fan during an officer meal when Hackman’s character superciliously asks Washington’s to summarize his thoughts on the nature of war and Gandolfini smirks (see above) in this way that implies “Ok, hotshot, show me whatcha got” with more animosity than most characters get when they are throwing a punch.
1. Richard Valeriani. There are a thousand things I love about this movie, but one of the things I love most is that it frames its big introductory chunk of exposition as a faux CNN report filed from the deck of an aircraft carrier by the real-life reporter Richard Valeriani. That’s inspired. Valeriani was on Nixon’s enemies list, his wife Kathie Berlin told The New York Times when her husband died in 2018, and he kicked off one of the greatest (more than) middling thrillers ever made. What a career.
