Faithfully adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel –– and hence the equally epic four hour running time –– this Technicolor extravaganza pulls focus on southern belle Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh, in a legendary performance), living in idyll splendor on a plantation.Īs the film unspools we follow Scarlett’s struggle through the turbulent South during the Civil War and the following Reconstruction. “As magnificent as it is phony, as stereotyped as it is stunning,” wrote film critic Eleanor Ringel, lauding Gone with the Wind as “enduring and immutable, it is what movies are all about.”Ĭertainly the most magnificent of Hollywood epics, director Victor Fleming’s Civil War drama Gone with the Wind is a marvel of moviemaking and a poetic ballad to the Old South. Time Out’s Geoff Andrews said it well when he praised Farewell My Concubine as “…appropriately operatic, Chen’s visually spectacular epic is sumptuous in every respect. At times the film is a history lesson, a social critique, a musical, and a very moving love story.
Often colorful, formal, and achingly maudlin, the cruelness of fate and the madness of the heart is rarely so elegantly told.
#10 MOST EPIC MOVIES PROFESSIONAL#
Over the next several decades, the two men maintain a complicated professional and personal friendship as China undergoes a similar turbulent and profound change.įarewell My Concubine unfolds with great and rewarding patience, showing affection not just for the characters, but for the theater as well. While pretending to be in love with Duan onstage, Cheng soon finds himself having actual romantic feelings for his co-star, which are tragically not reciprocated. Cheng begins to specialize in playing female roles, regularly against Duan’s domineering male leads. Opening in 1924 a young Cheng Dieyi (Cheung) starts his training at the Beijing Opera House at the same time as the enchanting Duan Xiaolou (Zhang). Adapted from Lillian Lee’s award-winning 1985 novel, “The Hegemon-King Bids Farewell to His Concubine”, and set against the political unrest of the mid-20th century, this Palme d’Or winning film also benefits from a brilliant cast including Leslie Cheung, Gong Li, and Fengyi Zhang. It’s a tour de force of carefully constructed sorrow and lasting reprieve.ĭirector Chen Kaige displays his signature flair for lush visuals and epic scope in his historical Chinese romance from 1993, Farewell My Concubine. Not only does it harken to the grandiose epic cinema of David Lean (his sweeping 1965 epic Doctor Zhivago is further on down this list) it also embraces the chimeric poetry of Ondaatje’s writing, cloaking the production in fascination, mystery, eroticism, and artistic allure. The labyrinthine plot succeeds due to its passionately romantic classicism and its faultless and rigorously deft designs. Under the care of a Québécois nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche, brilliant), Lazlo recounts his past, particularly his love affair with a married woman, Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas), that ends in, yup you guessed it, terrible misfortune.
An amnesiac pulled from the wreckage of a biplane in North Africa, his days are sadly numbered. Winning nine Oscars overall, including best picture and director, The English Patient has, at its core, a poetic and painful doomed love story starring the eponymous patient, a disfigured due to serious burns World War II pilot, Lazlo de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes). Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 Can-Lit classic and Booker Prize-winning novel “The English Patient” made for an epic, Academy Award-sweeping adaptation for director/screenwriter Anthony Minghella (Truly Madly Deeply ).
0 kommentar(er)
