Felt so wrong for that to be played by Henry Fonda. It’s like watching Jimmy Stewart boil rabbits in the 1971 TV remake of Harvey.
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I have seen Caligula in cut and uncut forms. The latter just has more badly-inserted bad insertions. Although it does remind me of an anecdote from Peter O’Toole; on his first day, he was walking to the set and saw Sir John Gielgud coming back from shooting one of his own scenes.
Peter: What’s it like?
John: My dear boy, it’s marvellous! I’ve never seen so much cock in my life!
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Peter Graves: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?
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And that director’s nod had to be campaigned for by several Hollywood directors. Ran doesn’t even earn a foreign film Oscar, Japan didn’t submit it because they were upset with Kurosawa for skipping the premiere… oh grow up, this should be about the art, not the grudges or campaigns. (I know, that’s a naive thought).
I’m also surprised Oscar didn’t nominate another epic in that category, the brilliant (but brutal) “Come and See” (it was submitted, but not accepted as a nominee… baffling)
To top off the crap sandwich, they didn’t nominate Shoah for documentary… so yeah, the Academy was off its nut in '85.
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Cabiria, Passion of Joan of Arc, Battleship Potemkin, Thief of Baghdad…maybe Greed (though it feels more intimate). Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. What is epic if not Fritz Lang’s Metropolis? Or his Die Niebelung (he wrote, sure he has spelled it incorrectly)? Murnau’s Faust feels epic to me, with its war between Heaven and Hell.
For more modern epics, I really like the Korean Along With Gods duology. (I think a 3rd and a 4th are planned but…lockdown.) They’re basically one 4 3/4 hour movie.
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The “uncut” is not so much “uncut” as “we added in a bunch of porn”.
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I just looked and Hoopla has them for streaming, they just went into the que. Looking forward to them.
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I hope you enjoy. I find current Korean pop cinema much, much more enjoyable than American pop cinema these days. And the upside is, I always leave the theater proud to be a Korean! (Downside, I also come out hating the Japanese. But I get over it.)
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I feel like either Peter Jackson’s King Kong or his Lord of the Rings trilogy fit the bill for me perfectly. Genuinely hope that this new Dune film can bring those types of films back for me.
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Definitely agree on Metropolis, yeah. I would’ve liked to make an argument for Caligari, but Metropolis has a much broader sweep. Caligari is more of an artistic statement.
While I’m thinking about it, is there any agreement on adding Jaws to the list, for creating the summer blockbuster? And also being a damn good movie in its own right? I went with friends to a showing here in town in '19, and we took their kids… who had never seen it before. We spent most of the movie watching them. 
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100% Jaws should be on the list!
Has there ever been a more iconic theme song for a movie EVER? AND as you said, it was the start of the summer blockbuster.
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Caligari is just great. There’s a '60s version that is MST3K worthy though. BEVARE!
As for Jaws, I didn’t like it when I was a kid. Because everyone kept saying “it’s a scary movie!” Like it’s some sort of horror flick, which it most definitely is not. Years later I took my kids to see it and was just bowled over by what a great adventure film it is.
Definitely epic.
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I’ve only done the whole thing in one sitting once.
But it has become a tradition to watch the entire 11.5 hours over Xmas break, just not all at once.
Can we consider Star Trek II-IV as one continuous epic? Because I’d vote for that as well as LOTR.
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Jaws is an interesting one for me. For much of my adult life, I’d only seen bits and pieces of the movie (and the last half hour more times than I can count) because it would be on TV all the time. Plus, it’s a well-known movie and so I knew the whole story of it without ever sitting and watching the whole thing.
Well, one night a couple of years ago, I saw that it was going to be on and I thought, “Hey, I should watch the beginning of this movie for once instead of just the end.” So I did. I sat and watched the first half hour for the first time ever and, in spite of knowing everything that was going to happen, I was amazed at how disturbing it was for me. That opening scene is frightening, not in a horror movie/slasher way, but in a deep visceral way, a reaction to the absolute helplessness that the first victim experiences. Honestly, I was both disturbed and mega-impressed by how I reacted to it.
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I mentioned The Ten Commandments!
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Good one! I’d add Aguirre, the Wrath of God to that as well.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s films are of epic length, but of intimate scope, so I wouldn’t call them epics in the traditional sense. I genuinely love his Solaris. Films by other directors I’d put in the “intimate epic” category include Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (15 hours!) and Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy.
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Most of the big ones have been mentioned, but I have a few other favorites.
Big Fish. Such an underrated film.
Blade Runner
Dirty Dozen
Goodfellas
The Godfather
Heat (That cast directed by Michael Mann? No brainer for me)
LA Confidential
The Right Stuff
For my wife : The Never Ending Story 
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I’d vote for that. If you pretend Star Trek V never existed, II through VI are some of the best Trek out there.
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Oh, how could I forget that one! The sad thing is, it pretty much bombed at the box office (I think Return of the Jedi released around the same time), but picked up what ten Oscar nominations? And now it’s part of the National Film Registry as an example of excellence in film making.
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Two of my top favorite epics are Last of the Mohicans and Braveheart. Although I watch most of the battle scenes from Braveheart through my fingers!
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