There are people who think epic cinema should be admired from a respectful distance. Absolutely not. If a movie wants three hours of your life, it sho
There are people who think epic cinema should be admired from a respectful distance. Absolutely not. If a movie wants three hours of your life, it should make you forget your phone exists. That is why The Lord of the Rings trilogy remains such a vicious benchmark. You get Moria, Helm’s Deep, the Ride of the Rohirrim, Gollum (Andy Serkis) arguing with himself, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) kicking that helmet like it personally offended him, and a fellowship you genuinely miss when everyone splits up. Those movies are enormous without ever becoming impersonal.
So beating them on pure entertainment is almost unreasonable. The movie needs scale, yes, but also people you immediately care about, scenes you start waiting for on rewatches, and enough personality that the spectacle never turns into pricey wallpaper. Only three epics make the argument feel remotely defensible. And even then, this is the kind of opinion worth losing an evening over with friends.
3
‘Gladiator’ (2000)
Image via DreamWorks Distribution
Gladiator 2 was okay. But this is the OG. Maximus (Russell Crowe) begins Gladiator as Rome’s greatest general and ends up stripped of everything that gave his life meaning after Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) takes power. The premise is brutally elementary after that. Survive. Become useful enough in the arena to get closer to Rome. Make Commodus look increasingly nervous every time the crowd starts chanting Maximus’ name. The movie understands exactly how satisfying it is to watch competence become revenge.
And the arena stuff still absolutely rips. Maximus organizes terrified gladiators into a Roman defensive formation while chariots circle them, wins over a Colosseum that was supposed to watch him die, then pulls off the helmet reveal in front of Commodus with the confidence of a man who has been rehearsing that introduction in his head for months. “Are you not entertained?” became the quote, but the film earns it because Maximus really does have to perform for people who treat death like Saturday-night entertainment. Gladiator is enraged, muscular, sentimental, and just shameless enough about all four.
2
‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966)
Clint Eastwood smokes a cigarette standing in a dehydrated, droughty landscape in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.Image via United Artists
Three men spend the American Civil War chasing the same buried Confederate gold, and almost nobody in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly can be trusted for longer than it takes to reload. Blondie (Clint Eastwood) and Tuco (Eli Wallach) are great, terrible friends, repeatedly betraying, rescuing, exploiting, and nearly killing each other because cooperation remains slightly more profitable than murder. Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) simply makes every room worse by entering it.
The movie is nearly three hours long and somehow keeps finding another thing you want to see. Tuco sprinting through Sad Hill Cemetery while Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of Gold” keeps building is one of those sequences that makes you understand why people become annoying about movies. Then comes the three-way standoff, with Sergio Leone cutting between eyes, hands, guns, and empty space until drawing a revolver feels like the most essential act occurring anywhere on Earth. Even the Civil War detour gives Blondie and Tuco a bridge to destroy because two armies have become inconvenient to their treasure hunt. It is huge, comical, mean, nippy as hell, and still impossible to watch casually.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?
Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
Parasite
Everything Everywhere
Oppenheimer
Birdman
No Country for Old Men
FIND YOUR FILM →
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want?
The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
ASomething that pulls the rug out — that makes me think I’m watching one kind of film and then reveals I’m watching another entirely.
BSomething overwhelming — comical, depressed, absurd, and genuinely moving, all at once.
CSomething grand and weighty — a film that makes me feel the full scale of what I’m watching.
DSomething formally daring — a film that pushes what cinema can even do.
ESomething lean and relentless — pure tension with no wasted frame.
NEXT QUESTION →
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film?
Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
AClass, inequality, and what people are willing to do when desperation meets opportunity.
BIdentity, family, and the chaos of trying to hold your life together when everything is falling apart.
CGenius, moral responsibility, and the catastrophic weight of a decision you can never take back.
DEgo, legacy, and the terror of becoming irrelevant while you’re still alive to watch it happen.
EEvil, chance, and whether moral order actually exists or if we just tell ourselves it does.
NEXT QUESTION →
03
How do you like your story told?
Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
AGenre-twisting — I want it to start in one lane and migrate into something completely different.
BMaximalist and genre-blending — comedy, action, drama, sci-fi, all in one ride.
CEpic and non-linear — cutting between timelines, building a mosaic of cause and consequence.
DA single unbroken flow — I want to feel like I’m living it in real time, no cuts to safety.
ESpare and precise — every scene doing exactly what it needs to do and nothing more.
NEXT QUESTION →
04
What makes a truly great antagonist?
The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
AA system — concealed, structural, and almost impossible to fight because it has no single face.
BThe self — the ways we sabotage, abandon, and fail the people we love most.
CHistory — the unstoppable momentum of events that no single person can stop or redirect.
DThe industry — the machinery of culture that chews up talent and spits out irrelevance.
EPure, implacable evil — a force so certain of itself it becomes almost philosophical.
NEXT QUESTION →
05
What do you want from a film’s ending?
The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
AShock and inevitability — a conclusion that recontextualises everything that came before it.
BEarned emotion — I want to cry, laugh, and feel genuinely hopeful, even if the world is a mess.
CDevastation and grandeur — an ending that makes me sit in silence for a few minutes after.
DAmbiguity — something that leaves enough open that I’m still thinking about it days later.
EBleakness — an straightforward refusal to pretend the world is tidier than it actually is.
NEXT QUESTION →
06
Which setting pulls you in most?
Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
AA gleaming up-to-date city with a hidden underside — beauty masking rot, wealth masking desperation.
BA collapsing suburban life that opens onto something infinite — the multiverse of a single ordinary person.
CThe corridors of power and science at a world-historical turning point — where decisions echo for decades.
DThe grimy, alive chaos of New York and Hollywood — fame as both destination and trap.
EVast, indifferent landscape — desert and highway where violence arrives without warning or reason.
NEXT QUESTION →
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most?
Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
AProduction design and mise-en-scène — every frame composed to carry meaning beneath the surface.
BEditing and tonal control — the ability to move between registers without losing the audience.
CScore and sound design — music that becomes inseparable from the dread and awe of what you’re watching.
DCinematography as performance — the camera not recording events but participating in them.
ESilence and restraint — what’s left unsaid and unshown doing more work than any dialogue could.
NEXT QUESTION →
08
What kind of main character do you root for?
The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
ASomeone clever and resourceful who makes increasingly perilous decisions under pressure.
BSomeone overwhelmed and ordinary who turns out to be capable of something extraordinary.
CA brilliant, tortured figure whose gifts and flaws are inseparable from each other.
DA self-destructive artist whose ego is both their superpower and their undoing.
EA silent, principled person trying to make sense of a world that has stopped making sense.
NEXT QUESTION →
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time?
Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
AI love a tardy build when I know the payoff is going to be seismic — patience for a devastating reveal.
BGive me relentless momentum — I want to feel breathless and emotionally spent by the end.
CEpic runtime doesn’t scare me — if the material demands three hours, give me three hours.
DI want it to feel propulsive even when nothing is technically happening — restless energy throughout.
EDeliberate and unhurried — I want dread to accumulate in the spaces between the action.
NEXT QUESTION →
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema?
The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
AUnsettled — like I’ve just seen something I can’t fully explain but can’t stop thinking about.
BMoved and energised — like the film reminded me what actually matters and gave me something to hold onto.
CHumbled — like I’ve been in the presence of something genuinely essential and overwhelming.
DExhilarated — like I’ve just seen cinema doing something it’s never quite done before.
EHaunted — like a frosty, silent dread that stays with me for days.
REVEAL MY FILM →
The Academy Has Decided
Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly comical, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel essential without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses straightforward comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a up-to-date kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we exploit to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is straightforward in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
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1
‘Seven Samurai’ (1954)
Takashi Shimura holding a sword and moving forward in Seven Samurai.Image via Toho
A penniless farming village learns that bandits will return after the harvest, so the villagers go looking for samurai willing to defend them for little more than food. That recruitment alone makes Seven Samurai ridiculously straightforward to get invested in. Kambei (Takashi Shimura) has the serene authority of someone everyone instinctively listens to. Katsushirō (Isao Kimura) is newborn enough to romanticize the whole thing. Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) barges into the group with a stolen family record, too much confidence, and the energy of a man determined to be included whether anyone approves or not.
Then Akira Kurosawa turns preparation into entertainment. The village gets mapped. Weak points are identified. Farmers are trained. Social divisions between samurai and peasants keep causing friction because everyone has reasons not to trust everyone else. And when the bandits finally attack, the action is frighteningly clear. Horses crash through mud, defenders close routes behind attackers, and the notable rain-soaked battle feels messy without ever becoming visually confusing. Nearly every up-to-date “assemble the team and defend the place” movie owes this something. More importantly, it is still thrilling without needing that history lesson. Put it on for someone intimidated or weirded out by a 1954 Japanese movie. It’ll change their view about the whole genre and era.
Seven Samurai
Release Date
April 26, 1954
Runtime
207 Minutes
Director
Akira Kurosawa
Writers
Akira Kurosawa
