Backdraft is a harrowing, uncomfortably intense story of firefighters at work. It is at once thrilling and heart-stoppingly scary. A less ambitious director might have left it at that. But Ron Howard ...

Backdraft” has spectacle, it has stars, it has love, death, pain and lots of fire. But what it needed most was a final draft. The movie, covering a heroic bunch of firefighters in Chicago, seems like ...