Quo Vadis
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
1951
Peter Ustinov plays Nero as a needy child with an empire, and steals the entire picture: MGM built ancient Rome at Cinecitta and the film rescued the studio's finances.
★ 1.7
The Movies canon
Sourced and screened.
Every film chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
El Cid
Directed by Anthony Mann
1961
Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren in the last great historical epic before the genre collapsed: real castles in Spain, thousands of extras on horseback, and Miklos Rozsa's score doing the heavy lifting.
★ 2.8
Les Miserables
Directed by Tom Hooper
2012
Every note was sung live on set instead of lip-synced to a recording, which nobody had attempted at this scale: the camera sits inches from faces the entire time.
★ 3.5
The Ten Commandments
Directed by Cecil B. DeMille
1956
American television has run it every Easter for over fifty years: DeMille parted the Red Sea with gelatin, dumped water and a reversed film, and nobody has topped the sheer nerve of it.
★ 5.5
Spartacus
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1960
Kirk Douglas helped break the blacklist by putting Dalton Trumbo's real name on this film: a slave revolt against Rome staged at enormous scale, with Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton circling the politics.
★ 6.1
Braveheart
Directed by Mel Gibson
1995
Historians have been correcting it for thirty years and nobody cares: Gibson staged medieval battle with a physical brutality nothing before it had, and the speeches still work on an audience.
★ 6.3
Ben Hur
Directed by William Wyler
1959
The chariot race took months to shoot and has never been bettered: Wyler's epic runs almost four hours and earns every minute of the nine it spends inside that arena.
★ 6.3
The Last of the Mohicans
Directed by Michael Mann
1992
Michael Mann's most romantic film ends with twelve near-wordless minutes carried entirely by the score: Daniel Day-Lewis learned to live off the land for it, and the frontier looks genuinely unmapped.
★ 6.4
Gladiator
Directed by Ridley Scott
2000
It dragged the Roman epic back after thirty-five years of dormancy: Russell Crowe's fury is the whole engine, and the arena sequences still deliver everything they promise.
★ 7.5
Saving Private Ryan
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1998
War films look different since the first twenty minutes of this one: Spielberg put the camera in the surf at Omaha Beach and veterans left cinemas unable to speak.
★ 8.8