The historical epic is defined by scale and the best entries here are the ones that know scale is not the subject. Dreyer’s Joan of Arc is built almost entirely out of close-ups. A Man for All Seasons is a series of conversations in rooms. Both are epics because of what is at stake rather than what is on screen.
The other pattern is that the strongest films in the form are about a person refusing. More refusing an oath, Joan refusing a recantation, Becket refusing a king, Marguerite refusing to stay quiet. Spectacle surrounds them and the drama is a fixed position.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year.
1. The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974)
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"The best Dumas adaptation ever filmed, and the cast did not know they were making two."
These two films take the top of this list because Richard Lester solved a problem nobody else has. A swashbuckler can be funny or it can be exciting, and almost every attempt at both produces something that is neither. Lester made the comedy come from incompetence rather than from jokes, which means the audience laughs and the danger stays intact.
The duels are the evidence. Men slip in mud, get tired, drop things, fight in inconvenient clothing and win by cheating. William Hobbs choreographed them to look like actual seventeenth-century fights rather than fencing exhibitions, and the result is both the funniest and the most convincing swordplay in the genre.
The production is notorious for a separate reason. Lester shot both films simultaneously and the studio released them as two pictures, so the cast were paid for one and appeared in two. The resulting litigation produced the Salkind clause, now standard in actors’ contracts, requiring a contract to state how many films are being made.
William Hobbs choreographed the fights to look like actual seventeenth-century combat, with men slipping in mud, tiring and winning by cheating.
Lester shot both films simultaneously and the studio released them separately, which produced the Salkind clause now standard in actors’ contracts.
The comedy comes from incompetence rather than from jokes, which is why the duels are funny and the swords stay sharp.
2. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
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"An epic assembled almost entirely from faces."
This is the argument that an epic does not require scale. Dreyer’s silent film covers the final day of Joan’s trial and is shot almost entirely in close-up against blank walls, with the period, the architecture and the crowd removed from the frame.
What that leaves is an interrogation. Maria Falconetti’s performance is the foundational work of screen acting and was reportedly obtained through conditions on set that would end a director’s career now. She never made another significant film.
The negative was destroyed in a fire, a second version assembled from outtakes was destroyed in another, and a complete print was found in a Norwegian psychiatric hospital in 1981. The film survived by accident and is still the most intense thing on this page.
Dreyer shot almost entirely in close-up, with Falconetti’s face filling the frame for most of the film and almost no establishing shots at all.
The original negative was destroyed in a fire and a complete print was found in a Norwegian psychiatric hospital in 1981.
Falconetti never made another film, and the performance was reportedly extracted through conditions that would not be permitted now.
3. Robin Hood (1938 / 1973 / 1991 / 2010), Contrast Review
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"Four adaptations, and the 1938 one solved it so completely that nobody has improved on it."
The 1938 Warner production is the canonical version and one of the great American films of the 1930s, and the reason it is here alongside three later attempts is that the comparison makes the argument for it.
Curtiz and Keighley shot it in early three-strip Technicolor with Flynn, Rathbone and de Havilland, and Korngold’s score. The confidence is total. Nobody in it is conflicted, the adventure is not apologised for, and the film assumes the audience wants exactly what it is being given.
Each later version adds something the original deliberately lacked. The 1991 adds grit, the 2010 adds a psychological backstory and a political framework, and each addition costs the thing that made the 1938 film work. The pattern is instructive well beyond this property.
Rathbone was a genuinely accomplished fencer and the final duel is staged largely in shadow thrown on a wall.
Korngold wrote the score as though for an opera and effectively established what a Hollywood adventure score would sound like for fifty years.
Each later version adds grit or a political framework, and each loses the confidence the 1938 film had.
4. War and Peace (1966-1967)
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"Seven hours and twenty minutes, four films, and the most expensive Soviet production ever mounted."
Bondarchuk’s adaptation is on this list as the outer limit of what the form can physically achieve. Released in four parts between 1966 and 1967, with the resources of a state behind it, including Soviet Army units numbering in the tens of thousands.
The Borodino sequence is the last time a battle of that scale will be staged with people. Everything comparable since has been generated, and the difference is visible in a way that no amount of rendering has closed.
It is also genuinely faithful to Tolstoy rather than merely enormous, which is the harder achievement. The ballroom sequence and the Moscow fire are the two that demonstrate the production could do intimacy and catastrophe with equal control.
The Soviet production ran over six years, used tens of thousands of soldiers as extras, and remains the most expensive film ever made when adjusted.
Bondarchuk suffered at least one heart attack during production and directed sequences from a stretcher.
The Borodino sequence uses no visual effects at all, which is why the scale is unarguable in a way digital crowds never are.
5. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)
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"The best religious satire ever filmed, and it is scrupulously careful about what it is attacking."
Life of Brian earns its position through precision. It is a comedy about a man mistaken for a messiah, and across its entire running time it never once mocks Christ, who appears briefly, delivers the Sermon on the Mount accurately, and is treated straight.
The target is followers. People mishearing the sermon from the back, arguing over a gourd and a sandal, splitting into factions over nothing, and demanding that a man who wants to be left alone tell them what to do. That distinction is maintained scene by scene, which is why forty years of attacks on it have never landed.
It was banned in several countries, picketed on release, and financed by George Harrison, who mortgaged his house because he wanted to see it. It also functions as a genuinely well-made historical film about first-century Judea.
It was financed by George Harrison, who mortgaged his house because he wanted to see it, which is the most expensive cinema ticket ever bought.
The film was banned in several countries and picketed on release, and the Pythons defended it in a televised debate that is better than most of the criticism.
The crucifixion finale is a genuine risk and works because the film has been rigorous about attacking followers rather than the figure.
6. Spartacus (1960)
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"Kubrick’s least Kubrick film, and it broke the blacklist."
Spartacus is here for a piece of history larger than anything in the film. Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, was credited under his own name for the first time since the blacklist, at Kirk Douglas’s insistence, and President Kennedy crossed a picket line to see it.
The film itself is a Kubrick picture only technically. He replaced Anthony Mann a week into shooting, had no script control, and later distanced himself from it. Douglas was producing and the picture is his.
What holds up is Olivier, Laughton and Ustinov circling each other in the Roman scenes, which are better than the slave revolt they frame. The I am Spartacus sequence has been parodied into meaninglessness and still works in context.
Kubrick was brought in after Anthony Mann was removed and has since disowned it as the only film he did not control.
Dalton Trumbo was credited under his own name for the first time since the blacklist, at Kirk Douglas’s insistence, which effectively ended it.
The I am Spartacus sequence is the most parodied scene in cinema and still works because the film earned it across three hours.
7. A Man for All Seasons (1966)
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"An epic in which almost nothing happens except conversations, and it is about silence."
This is the most precise film on the list and the least spectacular. Zinnemann’s adaptation of Bolt’s play follows Thomas More’s refusal to endorse Henry VIII’s marriage, and More’s entire strategy is to say nothing at all.
The drama is a legal question. Silence has historically been construed as consent, so a man who will not speak cannot be convicted of denying the supremacy, and the film is about the state’s steady work to get around that.
Paul Scofield had played it on stage and won Best Actor for the film. Robert Shaw’s Henry is on screen for one scene and dominates the memory of the whole picture, which is a lesson in how little screen time a well-written king requires.
Bolt adapted his own play and the film is two hours of people trying to get one man to sign something.
Paul Scofield had played the part on stage for years and won Best Actress’s male equivalent for a performance built almost entirely on stillness.
The argument about the silence, that qui tacet consentire videtur, is the whole film and is conducted in legal Latin without condescension.
8. Henry V (1989)
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"Branagh at twenty-eight, and Agincourt is mud rather than glory."
Branagh directed and starred in his first feature at twenty-eight and cast Ian Holm, Emma Thompson, Judi Dench, Brian Blessed and Robbie Coltrane around himself, which is either confidence or recklessness.
The film exists in deliberate opposition to Olivier’s 1944 version, which was made as wartime morale and staged Agincourt as pageantry. Branagh’s is filthy, exhausting and fought in standing water, and the victory is presented as survival rather than triumph.
The Non Nobis sequence, a single unbroken shot carrying the dead across the field while the hymn builds, is the best thing in any Shakespeare film. Four and a half minutes, one take, no dialogue.
Branagh was twenty-eight and cast Ian Holm, Emma Thompson, Judi Dench, Brian Blessed and Robbie Coltrane around himself.
It exists in deliberate opposition to Olivier’s 1944 version, which staged Agincourt as pageantry, and Branagh’s battle is fought in standing water.
The Non Nobis sequence runs over four minutes in a single unbroken shot with no dialogue.
9. El Cid (1961)
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"Anthony Mann directing Heston, and the ending is a dead man strapped to a horse."
El Cid sits just below the top tier because it is magnificent to look at and thinner than the films above it. Mann shot it in Spain with real castles, genuine cavalry in the hundreds, and a Miklós Rózsa score.
Heston plays Rodrigo Díaz as an idealised figure rather than a person, which is period-correct for the legend and limits what the film can do with him. Sophia Loren reportedly disliked the experience and it does not show.
The final image, the corpse armoured and strapped upright to ride out at the head of the army, is one of the great endings in the form and the film has spent two and a half hours earning the right to it.
Mann shot in Spain with real castles and cavalry in the hundreds, and Miklós Rózsa’s score is among the last of the great Hollywood epic scores.
Heston plays Rodrigo as an idealised figure rather than a person, which is period-correct for the legend and limits the drama.
The final image, the corpse armoured and strapped upright to ride out at the head of the army, is one of the great endings in the form.
10. Becket (1964)
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"Burton and O’Toole, and the film is a break-up."
Becket is on this list as a two-hander that happens to be wearing an epic’s costume. Glenville adapts Anouilh’s play, in which Henry II and Thomas Becket move from drinking companions to enemies once Becket is made Archbishop and unexpectedly starts taking the job seriously.
The historical accuracy is loose and the film is honest about being a play. What it has is Burton and O’Toole at full power in scenes written for two actors who can hold a room, and the friendship is genuinely convincing before it is destroyed.
O’Toole played Henry II again four years later in The Lion in Winter, which is the better film and covers the same king twenty years older.
Glenville adapts Anouilh’s play, in which two drinking companions become enemies once one of them is made Archbishop and starts believing in it.
The premise that Becket was Saxon is invented, which Anouilh later admitted, and the film keeps it because the class difference is the engine.
Burton and O’Toole are at full power in scenes written for two actors who can hold a room.
11. The Last Duel (2021)
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"The same events three times, and the third telling is labelled the truth."
The Last Duel earns its place on structure. Scott adapts Eric Jager’s account of the 1386 trial by combat between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris over Marguerite de Carrouges’s accusation of rape, and tells it three times.
The differences between the versions are the argument. In the men’s accounts the changes are tiny, self-flattering and unnoticed by the teller: a hand held slightly longer, a glance reinterpreted, a debt described as a favour. The third chapter is headed with a title card stating that it is the truth.
It failed commercially, which Scott attributed publicly to the audience rather than the marketing, and the duel itself is the most brutal thing he has staged.
The differences between the three accounts are small and self-flattering: a hand held longer, a debt described as a favour, a refusal remembered as reluctance.
The chapter heading on the third version simply states that it is the truth, which is the film’s only editorial intervention.
It failed commercially and the duel is the most brutal thing Scott has staged, filmed in a sustained sequence with no cutaways.
12. Ulysses (1954)
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"Kirk Douglas in a Homeric co-production that never quite reaches its own scale."
Ulysses is the bottom of this list because the source resists the format. Camerini’s Italian-American production compresses the Odyssey into under two hours, which means each episode gets a few minutes and none of them accumulate.
Douglas is well cast and Silvana Mangano doubles as Penelope and Circe, which is a genuinely clever piece of casting the film never fully exploits.
The Cyclops sequence is the best thing in it and the strengths are substantial without reaching the level of the major epics of the period.
Kirk Douglas plays Odysseus in an Italian production with Mario Bava working on the effects, which is the most interesting fact about it.
The cyclops sequence uses forced perspective and a single enormous eye, and is the only part of the film with any real invention.
It compresses the Odyssey into ninety-seven minutes, so most episodes get a scene each and none of them accumulate.