Epic
see all genres ›Exotic settings, casts of thousands, elaborate costuming and sweeping scores are all common elements of the epic. With roots stretching back to the very beginnings of literature, the epic is one of the most ancient forms of narrative. The film epic usually features a mythic hero engaged in a journey or quest and often draws upon legends of antiquity, religion and nationhood.
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Genres / Epic
SUB-GENRES · Historical · Religious
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Verdun
In order to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the end of World War I, Léon Poirier recreated the battle of Verdun and inscribed in history the lives of symbolic characters from both sides of the front. VERDUN was edited in three distinct parts (Might, Hell and Fate) and is an epic film of great...Watch Movie
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The Iron Crown
A deadly tournament for a princess' hand, a mystic "golden deer," babies switched at birth, a raised-by-lions quasi-Tarzan; everything but the proverbial kitchen sink was thrown into this extravagant fantasy adventure. Loin-clothed foundling Arminio (Massimo Girotti) leaves the jungle he grew up...Watch Movie
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The Hunchback of Notre Dame
HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME is a huge production: the sets depicting 15th century Paris covered nineteen acres of Universal Pictures' back lot and included the façade of Notre Dame Cathedral. Filming took six months and the climactic sequence employed two thousand extras, but it...Watch Movie
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Medea
Master Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini beautifully re-imagines Euripides' ancient Greek tragedy with Maria Callas in the title role. In this haunting tale, Medea sacrifices everything to win the heart of Jason, captain of the Argonauts, but when he spurns her love, Medea exacts a scorching...Watch Movie
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Siegfried
Filled with dragons, haunted woods, dwarf kings and epic battles, Fritz Lang's 1924 two-part epic DIE NIBELUNGEN has given inspiration to works as popular as STAR WARS and THE LORD OF THE RINGS and still stands as one of the greatest works ever made in fantasy cinema. The first part, SIEGFRIED,...Watch Movie
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The Birth of a Nation
More than 75 years after its initial release, THE BIRTH OF A NATION remains one of the most controversial films ever made and a landmark achievement in film history that continues to fascinate and enrage audiences. It is the epic story of two families, one northern and one...Watch Movie
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The Chess Players
Famed for its sophistication and faded splendors, the "golden city" of Lucknow provides the perfect backdrop for Ray's first historical film, a wry elegy set in an 1850s India on the brink of English rule and shot in an appropriately sumptuous Technicolor. More concerned with...Watch Movie
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The Spring River Flows East
27th on the Hong Kong Film Awards list of the greatest Chinese-language films of all time, THE SPRING RIVER FLOWS EAST has been termed China's GONE WITH THE WIND, a sweeping decades-spanning epic that sums up an entire nation's history and identity. A married couple in...Watch Movie
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Beginning of the Great Revival
BEGINNING OF THE GREAT REVIVAL details the historic events surrounding the Chinese Revolution, the period from 1911 to 1921 when Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Qing Dynasty and planted the roots of what has become modern-day China’s Communist government. The story charts the...Watch Movie
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The Master of Bankdam
THE MASTER OF BANKDAM is a Northern drama of epic proportions, charting the fortune of three generations of the Crowther family. It is 1850 and Simeon Crowther has built Bankdam into one of the most successful textile mills in Yorkshire. Having seen his business prosper...Watch Movie
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Three Ages
A brilliant historical satire teeming with inventive flourishes, Buster Keaton's THREE AGES is a silent comedy of truly epic proportions. This clever parody of D. W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE follows Buster's hard-luck romantic adventures throughout world history: from the dawn of man in the Stone...Watch Movie
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Kriemhild's Revenge
A film of movement and chaos as opposed to the first part's stillness and control, KRIEMHILD'S REVENGE tracks the widow Kriemhild as she exacts a terrible vengeance upon her husband's killers. Making GAME OF THRONES seem like a children's tale, the film offers up enough blood...Watch Movie
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Foolish Wives
As artistically brilliant as it is gleefully perverse, FOOLISH WIVES is Erich von Stroheim's epic-scale account of an American diplomat's wife who falls under the spell of a phony Russian Count. With his trademark eye for visual metaphor and gritty detail, von Stroheim infuses the artistocratic...Watch Movie
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Nero, or the Fall of Rome
Luigi Maggi's 1909 dramatization of the downfall of Nero comes off as steamy melodrama in more ways than one. The full-screen green tint matches the green-eyed monster that enters the opening scene, as Nero's wife Octavia notices the look that passes between her husband and...Watch Movie
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The Star of Bethlehem
Biblical tale about the birth of Christ told with a cast of 100's. Thanhouser's ambitious STAR OF BETHLEHEM was one of the first steps toward true feature-length films (more than two reels long). It appeared the year before the Italian epic QUO VADIS? was screened in the U....Watch Movie
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Intolerance
Under public pressure to top the epic sweep of his controversial BIRTH OF A NATION, D.W. Griffith upped his florid combination of gargantuan spectacle and heaving melodrama even further with INTOLERANCE, an epic that swooned through four separate eras in world history to demonstrate man's...Watch Movie
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Joseph in the Land of Egypt
The second of “Thanhouser Big Productions,” a monthly schedule, Joseph in the Land of Egypt was a true “feature” film, a new class of film which came to dominate the market by the end of 1914. A feature was an hour or more, heavily advertised, with elaborate production...Watch Movie
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The Trojan Women
After their ten-year siege, the victorious Greek army seeks to curse those Trojans whom fate has yet spared. Separated from their children, denied their mourning and destined for slavery, the women of fallen Troy huddle within the parched wreckage of their once glorious city....Watch Movie
