‘Thirteen Lives’ review: Ron Howard’s film depicts Thai cave rescue at both epic and intimate scale

Ron Howard’s claustrophobically intense and captivating “Thirteen Lives” is one of those movies where you find yourself marveling at the daunting logistics involved in re-creating one of the most famed and complex rescue efforts in recent history—but with an excessive running time of 147 minutes, by the time the story wraps up, we’re almost too exhausted to fully appreciate what we’ve just experienced.

Almost. The always reliable Howard—who demonstrated with the brilliant “Apollo 13” all those years ago that he knows a thing or two about crafting riveting drama from a true-life rescue effort that has a particular numeral in the title—does a marvelous job of keeping us in the loop as the point of view shifts any…