6. Barry Lyndon (1975)
Sure, it didn’t get enough love back in 1975, but purely on a shot-by-shot basis, this mid-18th century drama based on the 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray is every bit as expansive and jaw-droppingly beautiful as any other movie Stanley Kubrick helmed in his career.
An irreverent sendup of European high society which charts the meteoric rise of opportunistic Irish rogue Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) from rags to riches as he marries into a wealthy noble family during the Seven Years War, “Barry Lyndon” was actually stewed from bits and pieces of a decades-in-the-making Napoleon biopic that Kubrick never managed to get off the ground after Sergey Bondarchuk’s “Waterloo” bombed at the box office in 1970.
The result is a full-blown epic and an absolute masterclass in production design, natural lighting, and framing that has experienced a recent bump in popularity after being perceived by some as a disappointment upon release. Along with “Eyes Wide Shut”, it’s now become the consensus hip choice when naming your favorite Kubrick movie (not to mention the fact that it inspired the greatest film edit of all time — seriously, look up Barry Lyndon x 21 Savage on Twitter, you won’t be disappointed).
7. Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
From the Dollars trilogy to “Once Upon a Time in the West”, it isn’t too much of a stretch to say that every single collaboration between director Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone resulted in nothing less than a stone-cold masterpiece. However, for us, it doesn’t get any more epic than their final film together: a sprawling, five-decade crime epic tracing the rise and fall of a band of Jewish gangsters — including Robert De Niro and James Woods — from their childhood spent roaming through the Lower East Side ghetto to their adult years consolidating their bootlegging empire during the Prohibition era.
At a 40-year distance, it’s easy to forget just how badly American distributors botched the original release of “Once Upon a Time in America”, so much so that the legendary Italian filmmaker vowed never to work again upon learning that over 90 minutes of his film had been left on the cutting room floor for its U.S. theatrical rollout. Sadly, it wasn’t until decades after his death that the complete 229-minute cut finally saw the light of day. Restoring a once-butchered labor of love into something much closer to the late director’s original vision, that European alternate version still plays like gangbusters today and lives on as an epic gangster saga worthy of mention alongside “The Godfather”, “GoodFellas” and “The Sopranos”.
8. Ran (1985)
A fiefdom is thrown into disarray after an aging warlord abdicates and splits his realm between his three power-hungry sons in Akira Kurosawa’s late-career masterpiece, which saw the visionary director hit another creative peak by masterfully transposing King Lear to 16th-century Japan. To call it the best Shakespeare adaptation ever brought to the screen (by quite a wide margin) almost feels like faint praise: “Ran” is obviously so much more than that — one of cinema’s great historical dramas, a 160-minute sustained adrenaline rush, and a full-blown war epic, massive in scope and haunting in its sense of inevitable tragedy.
How a 75-year-old veteran director on a cold streak who’d been struggling to secure funding and had nearly lost his eyesight by the time he transitioned from black-and-white to color casually pulled off the most visually striking and impeccable framed historical epics of all time has to be up there as one of the greatest bits in cinema history. It can feel like a backhanded compliment to suggest that every Kurosawa film prior to 1985 (“Seven Samurai”, “Throne of Blood” and “Kagemusha” included) feels, in hindsight, like a dry run for “Ran”. But this is just one hell of a bar to clear for everyone involved (including a completely unrecognizable Tatsuya Nakadai as Lord Hidetora). The color-coded battle scenes, featuring over 1,500 extras and 300 horses, are still stupefying to watch and hard to believe they exist at all to this day.
9. The Last Emperor (1987)
If your gut is sensing a pattern in this list, you’re absolutely right. Nothing spells epic like a sumptuous, big-budget movie biopic that unabashedly subscribes to the Great Man theory of history (and that’s without even counting notable omissions like “Malcolm X”, “Amadeus”, “Patton”, and “Oppenheimer”).
By all accounts, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning take on Chinese Emperor Pu Yi seems to fit the bill. Upon closer inspection, though, the first foreign production to be granted official permission to shoot in Beijing’s Forbidden City flips every genre trope on its head to portray the life and times of a powerless manchild stuck in a gilded cage and helplessly swept aside by the tides of history.
A filmmaker with a keen sense of scope and bone-deep understanding of the corrupting influence of power on the human spirit, Bertolucci was just the right kind of strong-willed auteur to be calling the shots and overseeing this gargantuan production. The 1987 Best Picture recipient scans through every broad stroke in Pu Yi’s rollercoaster of a life, from his coronation as a 3-year-old toddler through his eventual abdication during Japanese rule and meager existence as a peasant worker after the Communists took shop. Not that a 9-time Oscar winner could truly ever be underrated, but “The Last Emperor” inexplicably feels as such.
10. The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)
It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve seen it or how long it’s been: Like many comfort films, it’s never too soon to press play again on Peter Jackson’s epic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel and relive your childhood by escaping into Middle-earth to hang out with Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, and the rest of the gang as they set off for Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring.
If you’re feeling bold and have the extended editions queued up, you’re looking at a combined runtime of about 11 hours, which gets you plenty of breathtaking battles and rousing speeches along with one too many Merry and Pippin scenes for our taste. Sure, the sheer time commitment might be a hard sell to some, but it’s a small for price to pay, and once you curl up, throw it on, and let Howard Shore’s wistful score pull you in from the get-go, you’ll know you’re in it for the long haul.
Never mind that these movies take place in a fantasy world where hobbits, elves, dwarves, wizards, and men coexist, the Lord of the Rings is a monumental masterpiece every bit as rich, layered, and grand as any series grounded in reality. It’s worth noting that the source material, after all, shares more in common with Norse mythology, Beowulf, and the epics of Homer than, say, Harry Potter. Probably most remarkable of all is that the films were shot back-to-back, made heaps of money and earned 17 Academy Awards, inadvertently changing the entire movie industry in ways we’re still dealing with 20+ years later. Not too shabby for the indie director of “Braindead”.