Epic Bucket List

Read The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth

Watch Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey. Known for his ambitious filmmaking with practical effects and IMAX cameras, Nolan promises a grand retelling of Odysseus's ten-year journey home after the Trojan War. The film features a star-studded cast and is expected to be a cinematic spectacle.

Read The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the second volume in J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy series, and also read Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth, a collection of stories and essays expanding on the lore of Middle-earth.

Read The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the final volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy series, and also read Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth, a collection of stories and essays expanding on Middle-earth lore.

Watch the epic science fiction film Dune, based on Frank Herbert's novel.

Nolan's emotional voyage through space and time (2014).

Paul rides the worm and takes the Fremen south; the half that pays off.

Villeneuve's Arrakis: the ornithopters, the Sardaukar chant and half the book.

Watch Spartacus, the 1960 epic historical drama directed by Stanley Kubrick (the film is often incorrectly attributed to David Lynch; it stars Kirk Douglas as the Thracian gladiator who leads a slave revolt against the Roman Republic). The film is famous for its massive battle scenes, the iconic 'I am Spartacus' sequence, and a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo (a blacklisted writer who received credit, helping break the Hollywood blacklist).

The Iliad as a summer blockbuster, with Pitt as an Achilles who fights like a dancer.

A blacksmith becomes a knight and holds Jerusalem against Saladin; watch the director’s cut, not the release.

One accusation told three ways, ending in the last judicial duel France allowed.

Austerlitz and Waterloo hung on a marriage; Phoenix plays him as a sulk.

Columbus crosses, then governs badly; the Vangelis theme outlived the film by decades.

Lucius comes back to the arena twenty years on, with rhinos and a sea battle in the Colosseum.

Moses against Ramesses, with the ten plagues staged as natural disasters.

The flood as an environmental epic with rock angels; Russell Crowe builds the ark.

Fifty years of Yugoslavia in a cellar with a brass band; Kusturica's second Palme d'Or.

A family through forty years of Chinese history, from the civil war to the Cultural Revolution.

Five hours of a coal-mafia feud across three generations; Anurag Kashyap's Godfather.

A village woman raises her sons through famine and debt; the Indian epic of 1957.

A man raised in a village discovers he is the heir of a kingdom; Indian cinema at its most enormous.

Jet Li tells the King of Qin three versions of a story, each in a different colour.

Two revolutionaries in 1920s India, a tiger, a motorbike and "Naatu Naatu"; Tollywood at full scale.

Adrien Brody as a Hungarian architect in postwar Pennsylvania, in VistaVision with an intermission.

Pandora, the Na'vi and the 3D film that became the highest-grossing ever.