Genre: epic

Films built on a scale that changes how a story is told: years or decades of plot, casts in the hundreds, location photography standing in for the world itself, and a running time that assumes the audience has committed to the whole thing. The epic is less a subject than a set of production decisions, and the reviews here look at what that scale buys and what it costs. Historical spectacle dominates the form, from Roman arenas to desert campaigns to national upheaval, though the impulse survives into fantasy and war filmmaking.