OK, you won’t really. It’s an illusion. But it’s one hell of an illusion. “K-19: The Widowmaker” may be a bit too grim and claustrophobic to become a certifiable summer blockbuster, but it’s a pulse-pounding thriller that brings one of the Cold War’s darkest and deadliest episodes to the big screen. In place of the overblown histrionics of most summer movies, “K-19″ offers a vivid, highly realistic yarn of real-life heroism, the story of a small group of isolated and terrified men who risked death to save the world from apocalypse.

Like so many military movies, “K-19″ is about a conflict between two strong personalities, but it has no villains as such. With its mesmerizing scenes of the great sub diving to a human-crushing depth of 300 meters, or surfacing through the Arctic ice cap, it’s also a tribute to the marvels of large-scale machinery, so impressive when it works and so devastating when it doesn’t. On one hand, this joins Wolfgang Petersen’s “Das Boot” at the top of a very short list of the best submarine movies ever made. On the other, it’s also a clever and subtle work, not a war film or an anti-war film but a non-war film that’s designed to humanize and complicate viewers’ understanding of Cold War propaganda and the nature of bravery.

“K-19″ is also an old-fashioned Hollywood movie in the best possible sense of that term, the kind that only a handful of filmmakers — Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderbergh, say, along with Bigelow’s ex-husband, James Cameron — still have the power and freedom to create. It allows its big stars, Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson (as the captain and first officer of the stricken sub, respectively), to loom above the rest of the picture like dueling colossi, without losing touch with the escalating dramatic tension or the generously handled ensemble around them. For Bigelow herself, one of the most ambitious and intriguing of Hollywood action-film directors (as well as pretty much the only woman working in the genre), it’s also a triumphant comeback. Best known for the gritty vampire flick “Near Dark” and the sadistic cop-actioner “Blue Steel,” she hasn’t released a major-studio picture since the flawed if distinctive “Strange Days” in 1995.

Perhaps only Bigelow would have had the subversive sensibility — or the sheer balls — for this project: a Hollywood movie set at the height of the Cold War in which every major character is an officer or sailor in the Soviet Navy. No crewcut-sporting Americans show up to save the day or refocus the audience’s attention (in fact, this becomes a plot point in the canny screenplay by Christopher Kyle, from a story by Louis Nowra) and there are essentially no women in the picture. Like Capt. Alexei Vostrikov (Ford), the hardened-steel commander of K-19, we’re stuck in that sub with those men, that treacherous early-’60s Soviet technology and absolutely no way out.

Initially it sounds odd to hear Ford, Neeson and the rest of the cast speaking English with “Russian” accents, but the choice is part of Bigelow’s overall aesthetic strategy, not just bogus Hollywoodism. For one thing, the cast of “K-19″ is intended to simulate the wide range of nationalities and ethnicities found in the Soviet military, and so is drawn from all over the Northern Hemisphere, including the United States and Ireland (in the case of the two stars) and also Russia, Britain and Scandinavia. So having the actors speak a slightly uncomfortable lingua franca is a legitimate decision. More than that, the Slavo-English compels the cast to leave their comfortable 21st-century actor-dude mannerisms behind, drawing them and us materially and psychologically into a different place and time.

Vostrikov, for example, bears little resemblance to any character Harrison Ford has played before, reminding us how good an actor he can be when a director pushes him beyond his customary concerned-American-dad shtick. Vostrikov is every inch a Russian, a military hard man with a philosophical, even fatalistic streak who believes in driving his men — and his untested, nuke-powered submarine — to the edge of exhaustion. As the K-19 disaster unfolds, we learn almost nothing about Vostrikov’s personal life. According to gossip aboard the boat (all submariners call their craft “boats”), he got his appointment by marrying a Politburo member’s niece or daughter, but if it’s true she is never mentioned by name. Bigelow gives us just one momentary scene in Vostrikov’s quarters, where viewers who know a little music and can make out a little Cyrillic will learn that he’s a Beethoven fancier and a Tolstoy reader.

Vostrikov is brought in to command the K-19, the Soviets’ first ballistic nuclear submarine, after a dry-dock exercise goes awry under Mikhail Polenin (Neeson), its beloved captain, and the crew begins to believe that the great boat may be cursed. The navy brass, headed by the forbidding Marshal Zelenstov (Joss Ackland) don’t want to hear about any problems, and in Vostrikov they’ve got the right guy. Well before the boat leaves the port city of Murmansk (Halifax, Nova Scotia, is used as a convincing substitute) we know that Vostrikov has his doubts about the mission, but is not a man who believes in complaining or showing weakness.

If the resulting conflict-friendship drama between Vostrikov and Polenin is standard fare in military films, like most of “K-19″ it is marvelously executed. Neeson has also rarely been better; an actor of tremendous physical presence and charisma, he nonetheless plays Polenin as a withdrawn man locked in internal combat, torn between his sense that he’s the genuine leader of the K-19′s crew and his unwavering loyalty to military protocol.

The K-19′s officer corps also includes a Communist Party official, who’s on hand to show the men propaganda films about the evils of American life: Klan rallies, lynchings, forcible suppression of civil-rights demonstrations, widespread urban and rural poverty. He’s a discomfiting comic presence in the film; the professional navy officers around him can barely stand his pompous moralizing, but his arguments about the hypocrisy of Western materialism strike disturbingly close to the mark. (I’m reminded of a contemporary Russian witticism about the post-Soviet era: “At last we understand. Everything they told us about communism was false. And everything they told us about capitalism was true.”)

For the Kremlin leadership, the K-19′s maiden voyage in the spring and summer of 1961 was a question of survival. In terms of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union was outgunned 5-to-1 by the U.S., and American nuclear subs were patrolling Russian coastal waters, within easy missile reach of Moscow and Leningrad. Without a credible submarine-based deterrent of their own, the Soviets feared a devastating first strike by the U.S. (and, yes, class, there really were Washington hawks who advocated such a thing). But whatever the level of genuine threat may have been, sending an untested and ill-equipped boat out into the North Atlantic, armed with dangerously unstable weapons of mass destruction, was clearly a reckless decision.

Bigelow and Kyle supply only a little of this background, nor do they attempt to assign blame for what went wrong aboard the K-19 (although Vostrikov, who ultimately became a hero, must carry at least some of the responsibility). The film’s only political agenda is to make us see that the crew of the K-19 were following orders, as military men have always done, that they believed they were on the right side of history opposing a great evil and that they displayed incredible courage in the face of grave peril.

Bigelow’s measured pacing, her long traveling shots through the body of the sub that gradually convey its social and mechanical geography and her large-scale, heroic compositions are strikingly different from anything you see in contemporary Hollywood movies. I suspect she’s trying to channel the grandiose mood and spirit of classic Soviet films her audience has probably never seen, from Eisenstein and Dovzhenko to Aleksandr Askoldov’s “Commissar” and Eldor Urazbayev’s “Trans-Siberian Express.” (No, Blockbuster doesn’t carry those, but your nearest big-city public library might.)

There are admittedly moments when Kyle’s dialogue creaks and groans as much as the K-19′s hull at 300 meters, but most of the film is so exciting you won’t much care. Once Vostrikov has brought the boat crashing upward through the ice and successfully launched a test missile, things start to go wrong. A coolant leak develops in the aft nuclear reactor, which is supervised by Vadim (Peter Sarsgaard, in the movie’s standout supporting role), a young lieutenant fresh from the academy. With the reactor core overheating uncontrollably — and backup systems that either don’t work or were never installed — a meltdown is only hours away. If the core melts through its container, the boat’s thermonuclear warheads could explode, taking out not just the K-19 but the American destroyer shadowing it a mile away. Quite conceivably, this would be the opening shot of a new world war.

A group of crewmen, among them a sleepy-eyed, handsome sailor named Pavel (Christian Camargo), volunteer to enter the sealed reactor chamber — wearing nothing but rubber chemical suits — risking severe radiation exposure to make the difficult repairs. How long can the jury-rigged patch job hold? With its engines crippled and no radio contact with Moscow, will the K-19 crew ever get home? Will they be forced to scuttle their priceless sub or surrender it to the watching Americans? Obviously the world doesn’t blow up in the end, but I shouldn’t say more in deference to those who don’t know the real K-19 story (to which Bigelow and company stick pretty closely).

It would be a grave mistake to view “K-19″ as a pro-Soviet film, although in today’s frightful cultural climate I’m sure some idiot will make that charge. Much of the brilliance of Bigelow’s approach to this material (as in her other films) lies in her appreciation of its ambiguity. As an audience we must acknowledge the brave self-sacrifice of men who believed they were serving the Communist Party and the Soviet state, even though that party and that state had sent them out into the ocean on a poorly insulated pile of smoldering plutonium.

Of course the Hollywood party line is that “K-19″ is nothing more than a good story, but Bigelow is a cannier and trickier filmmaker than that. Not only does she not seek black-and-white moral equations, she actively tries to undermine them. Even in this movie’s few lighter moments, as when we watch these servants of the Evil Empire joyously playing soccer on the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean, it remains a fable about the perils of a Manichaean worldview, the danger that dividing the world into implacable camps of friends and foes leads to the annihilation of both. It’s just as valuable a lesson as it was 40 years ago — and just as devilishly difficult to apply to reality.

In an industry that has traditionally functioned almost entirely as an outlet for the creative visions of male directors, writers and producers, what the stereotypes have illustrated is the way men (at least moviemaking men) see women. And the way they’ve seen them, traditionally, has been with a potent mixture of adoration, lust, loathing and fear. Yet the much-maligned “male gaze” of film-theory legend has already gotten more than its share of play. What has been woefully absent is any discussion of the female gaze.

Few female directors have been given the opportunity to bring their representations of women to the screen, let alone their idealized, fantasy versions of men. Since 1922, only two women have been nominated for an Oscar in directing. Neither won. A few directors, such as Yvonne Rainer, have been able to make a name for themselves in the world of avant-garde and experimental film; others, such as Elaine May, who in the ’70s directed “Mikey and Nicky,” still one of the most powerful — and underrated — films of the decade, seemed fated to enjoy their successes in obscurity. In Europe, Agnes Varda, Claire Denis and Lina Wertmuller have been making solid and intelligent films for years. In America, female directors have been largely ignored.

But in the mid-1980s, when a wave of low-budget independent films made moviemaking more accessible to Hollywood outsiders, a handful of women began projecting complex and interesting female characters onto the screen. Allison Anders, Lisa Krueger and Mary Harron all made films that explored the female experience with honest and fresh female protagonists. Tamra Davis, Kathryn Bigelow, Amy Heckerling and Mimi Leder crashed the boy-dominated party of mainstream comedy, action and horror. And let’s not forget Barbra Streisand, Penny Marshall, Jodie Foster and Diane Keaton, who made the transition from actresses to directors and have given us a series of sweetly sentimental blockbusters.

But the new crop of female-fronted releases goes beyond the proto-feminist “about women, by women” model. The films of Kimberly Peirce, Krueger, Harron, Jane Campion, Denis and newcomer Sofia Coppola — all of which are premiering soon or currently in release — don’t fall under the feather-soft rubric of the typical “woman’s picture,” nor do they shy away from raw depictions of sexuality or violence. This new wave shows the beginnings of a kind of inversion, a fresh element in filmmaking and in the cultural psyche in general: The female gaze has finally hit the big screen. Suddenly, we can discern the sexualization of the male actor by the female director.

Campion has always been a master of exposing both the subtle carnality and the startling innocence that lurk beneath the surface of her male stars. In both “The Piano” and the recently released “Holy Smoke” she finds her muse in Harvey Keitel, whose particular brand of beautiful ugliness exemplifies a stormy, visceral sexuality — the “fire under the surface” of which Campion is so enamored. Some of her best male imagery is defined by a sort of “King Kong” idealization: the untamed brute with a soft heart for the right woman. Another element of Campion’s representation is the recurrence of men easily manipulated by the women in their lives (the baffled boyfriend in “Sweetie,” Sam Neill’s brutish husband in “The Piano”). In “Holy Smoke,” Campion continues this theme, with Keitel’s cult deprogrammer becoming programmed himself by Kate Winslet, brainwashed not by rhetoric but by her eager and delicious voluptuousness. For Campion, men are as malleable as clay.

In Coppola’s upcoming “The Virgin Suicides,” Josh Hartnett gives an electric performance as Trip Fontaine, a teenage Adonis whose graceful swagger will tap into any woman’s latent desire to seduce a 17-year-old. Coppola reportedly auditioned hundreds of young actors for the role, but with Hartnett she draws out a charisma and raw sexuality that can make you weak in the knees. This adoration of youth has existed for years in film. Watching Fontaine walk causes the same pang of guilty lust in women that Mena Suvari’s character in “American Beauty” must elicit in men. But Coppola’s scenes with Hartnett are a shrine to the fresh and vibrant carnality of teenage boys, a sort of reverse Lolita-ism. Eventually Fontaine becomes a catalyst for the film’s central tragedy and his aura fades, but for one brief moment the seduction is complete.

In “Committed,” Krueger has taken the age-old theme of a woman in love with a man who’s afraid to commit and turned it into a comedic road movie. Luke Wilson plays a blinking and confused sensitive guy searching for his soul in all the wrong places. What he has forgotten — in the midst of all this endearing self-absorption — is his wife, played by Heather Graham. Graham’s search for her husband is fueled by a blind optimism that would be annoying if it weren’t for Wilson’s inherent sweetness. The “nice guy” stereotype is in full form here and it’s a role Wilson was made for. With his good-natured demeanor and puppy-dog face, he’s an actor who can make even the most blatant selfishness seem somehow charming.

In “American Psycho,” Harron directs a delicately boned, elegantly dressed Christian Bale as Bret Easton Ellis’ coldhearted killer. Bale plays the part with bored and haughty bemusement, moving through the film like a smugly satisfied cat. “American Psycho” is not a film one might expect to be directed by a woman, but it is Harron’s feminine touch — and her humor — that keeps the film’s brutal elements palatable. In a satirical take on ’80s excess, Bale’s rich kid has a sense of entitlement as large as his ego — yet there’s something in his snobbery that is appealing. We can laugh at his cruelty because Harron has created an effective film stereotype: the privileged white Ivy Leaguer every viewer loves to hate.

In Peirce’s haunting “Boys Don’t Cry,” the brutality of the film’s “real” men is juxtaposed beautifully with the main character’s self-constructed masculinity. Hilary Swank’s “Brandon” seduces Chlok Sevigny’s Lana by offering a balance of female vulnerability and male strength. The girls in the film love Brandon for this quality; the men despise him. The film’s violence is fueled by the male characters, whose ignorance and insecurity in their own sexual power lead to a disturbing climax. But what makes the film truly explosive is the question it poses: Is what women really want in a man a woman?

One of the most beautiful films this year is Denis’ “Beau Travail,” a meditation on male sexuality that is as gorgeous and sublime as any movie made in the past decade. Set in the barren, black-rock plains of northern Africa, it takes as its essential focus the beauty of the male form, flawlessly composed in a series of shots of the main characters, a squadron of Foreign Legion soldiers. Throughout most of the movie, the sweat, blood and animal sexuality that make up the male mystique are reflected in the harshly beautiful landscape. The camera slowly pans over hot sands, twitching muscles and blue sea with equal relish.

Of all of these directors, it is Denis’ fearless sexualization that perhaps best illustrates our perception of men. Her characters are a mixed batch, encompassing the whole gamut of male iconography: from Campion’s brute, to Coppola’s pretty boy, to Krueger’s nice guy. But it’s her unapologetic objectification of the male body that is most exciting of all.

The “eye,” so long dominated by men, has slowly but surely been attained by female directors. And what does this reflection show us? How exactly do women perceive men? Do we see selfish brutes, softhearted fools, psycho killers? Do we worship, like men, the beauty of youth? Do we pay tribute, like the Greeks, to the thin graceful curves of the adolescent male body? Most likely, we do all of the above, with each of these elements contained in our assessment of the opposite sex — the innocence, the cruelty and the helplessness combined.

But what’s most refreshing is simply that female directors are beginning, at last, to explore the same themes their male counterparts have explored. It’s our time to deconstruct the opposite sex, to manipulate male sexuality according to our own observations and whims. After too many years, it’s finally our turn to objectify, sexualize, fear, worship, loathe, adore and, best of all, lust after.