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Name says it all. What are your favorite cinema sea battles?

Off the top of my head, the movie featuring my favorite sea battle scene(s) is Midway (1976) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074899/).

My favorite movie about a sea battle would be The Enemy Below (1957) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050356/).

Some honorable mentions include (but are not limited to):

Run Silent Run Deep (1958) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052151/)
Away All Boats (1956) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048971/)
Ben Hur (1959) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052618/)
The Sea Hawk (1940) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033028/)

Jaws [1975]: The last hour of the film, where Brody, Quint & Hooper try to kill the shark. The shark takes down the barrels, cracks a hole in the boat, destroys Hooper's cage and eats Quint. It's the best part of the film hands down, with the three men bonding with each other to try to capture the monster fish. In the end, Brody finishes the job just before the boat completely sinks, shooting a gas canister in the shark's mouth, blowing it to pieces. Awesome.  :teddyr:

"Master and Commander", with Russell Crowe, gets no respect, but that scene where he sees the flash of cannonfire through the low fog before the cannonballs come screaming in is just a great piece of cinema.  Lots of good old wooden-ships & cannons throughout.  Actually, I really haven't seen any film with wooden ships & cannons blasting away at each other that I couldn't find something to like about!

Anything with Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks Sr. swingning in on ropes.  I liked stuff like that as a child and still do today.

"The Bedford Incident", with Sydney Potier:  Taught, tense, Cold-War stuff, with the spectre of the Nazi German navy hovering in the background.  A real stop-and-think film that captures the tensions & brinksmanship of that era.

peter johnson/denny crane

Just finished watching "Captain Blood" and that has a great climactic sea battle with wonderfully elaborate miniature scenes..

GoHawks has already mentioned one of my two favorites: "Ben Hur." I would add that it is also one of the bloodiest as you're ever likely to see, especially as it was made in 1959. A slave comes up from below, and as you notice him, you notice that half of his left arm is missing. A man gets a torch shoved into his face. So bloody, that I have seen the violence edited out for television, years after the film was made.

And while I have seen some of the others and enjoyed them, the only sea battle that compares to the one in "Ben Hur" is the first naval battle in "Dam the Defiant."
aka "H.M.S. Defiant."

Enjoy!

Good calls.
We could sub-devide to 'pre gunpowder / pre ironclad / post ironclad / post airpower' eras of sea combat.

The fight between the frigate HMS Lydia and the ship of the line Natividad in the 1951 film "Captain Horatio Hornblower" starring Gregory Peck in the title roll. I've always felt that this is the closest Hollywood has come to matching a sea battle described in a novel.

For me, it has to go to Battleship Potemkin. The mutinous crew of Russian sailors overthrowing the Czarist scum and making history on land from the high seas. And not to mention the tension-building climax as the Czarist fleet slowly bears down on the battleship, making many of the crew question their odds of survival. As the dark grows, so does the shadow on their souls. While it is obvious Bolshevik Propaganda, this film has some powerful stuff to it.

"Brothers! Who are you shooting at?"