Just a handful of epics I collected.

Few directors would always get international audience.

And when one considers the positive public response to many of David Lean's films, it is just fair to say that only few directors have commanded such a large portion of the mass audience.

Working again with his screenwriter Robert Bolt, Lean's epic film Doctor Zhivago could be described as " a fateful series of brief encounters."

The complicated narrative is held together by a series of connecting and associative images--moon, windows, candles, cornflowers and daffodils to suggest the two women in Zhivago's life.

Doctor Zhivago (Omar Shariff) is the idealistic doctor hero swept along by the epic events of the Russian Revolution in Bolt's adaptation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel. Banned in the Soviet Union but acclaimed in the West, the novel is a about the story of love and a great documentary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The lovers are Zhivago and the beautiful, sensual Lara (Julie Christie), for whom a brief happiness is tragically engulfed by the tide of history. There is a stunning last shot of Lara, as she disappears alone down a grey street that is dominated by a huge red poster of Stalin.

It is an image that crystallizes the theme of the individual and the state, as well as implicitly asking questions that are at the heart of Dr Zhivago--what the revolution was for, where it led, and, whom it affected.

Again, Director Lean has approached this film with his customary deliberation and meticulous preparation.

Inasmuch as some critics found the flick to be something of a disappoinment, it's a film with stunning cinematography, good script, and talented people behind it.

If you want size, action, spectacle, thrills, good triumphing over evil, and romance, this one is for you and por moi.

Be inspired, persecuted and be saved.

Love, war and death. That's what The English Patient is all about.

The English Patient is a cinematic epic that is rich in nuance, and yet poetic in its rendition of different locations and time periods.

Based on a novel by Michael Ondaatje, this flick dares to take an honest and raw look at emotion, plumbing the boundaries between love and death with sensitivity and nuance, deep feeling and powerful imagery.

The opening scenes establish the iconography of the film with a dream-like beauty, a shimmering, infinite landscape punctuated by carefully placed hieroglypths and ancient ruins. Reading between the lines, the imagery gives you more than what you have seen. It conjures deeper meaning, whether you see it as abstract, impressionism, semantics, surreal or just plain landscape. At first, these are as difficult to decipher as it is to recognize that the figure seated in front of Count Laszlo Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), in his flight across the desert, is his dead lover.

An unexpected plane crash transforms Laszlo into the disfigured English patient of the flick's title. Unable to move or to remember, his path leads him from the African desert to a bombed Tuscan monastery, where nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) looks after him at the end of World War 2. As the count gradually recalls his great, though doomed, love affair, a second love story unfolds between Hana and an Indian soldier from the bomb-disposal squad.

The New York Times described this movie in 1996 as: dreamlike, nonlinear tale moves in much the same way, swooping gracefully from past to present, from one set of lovers to another, from the contours of the body to the topography of the desert sands.

This film makes no attempt to tell a realistic story. Director Francis Ford Coppola is interested in myth, horror, and emotion. His lead actor, Martin Sheen, perfectly captures the subjectivity of horror, forcing the audience to look at things through his eyes.

In recalling the difficulty of filming Apocalypse Now, Coppola even made a remark that: during the shoot, there were times when he thought he would literally die, as a result of inability to solve his problems.

It took three insane and gruelling years, from 1976 to 1979 to complete the film. And after showing the flick, the 'rest is history' as majority claimed. Although the genre peaked with this film, generations of filmmakers have felt inspired to measure to themselves against this model.

Stylistically perfect and theatrical in structure and design, the film depicted war more elaborately and more 'effectively' than any other production before or since.

Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise is uncommonly long (almost three hours) but an exceptional film. It is richly entertaining and intensely romantic evocation of an epoch.

The tale unfolds against a meticulously reconstructed setting of mid-19th century Paris. It tells of the doomed love between the famous mime Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault), and the beautiful courtesan named Garance (Arletty). Garance is loved by four men in this film, but she really only loves Baptiste. It's more of the bittersweet joy and sorrow of lovers--a classic story of love and loss.

The characters and the narrative skill are both admirable. The strength of the dialogue, the music and the majestic images created make this film a magnificent one. The costume and design reminds me of the old Moulin Rouge, with Paris as the best place to hold everything colourful and grandiose spectacularium.

It's not as great as Casablanca, but nevertheless, this film belongs in that same category.

This flick was described in 1945 as "a superlative dramatic and visual achievement of the French cinema." An ambition being realized at that time.

Richard Attenborough's film focuses on the powerful convictions of the lawyer who led the nonviolent revolt against the British in the years following Wordl War 1. The biopic is a sweeping account of the life and times of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the saintly, pacifist father of modern India.

The film opens at the funeral of Gandhi, followed by his life in chronological backflashes, focusing on the passive resistance that became the trademark of his struggle for independence from Britain.

The three-plus-hour epic is indeed faithful to the historical records of Gandhi's achievements and his revolutionary adherence to nonviolence as a powerful political weapon. At the same time, Attenborough almost avoids the heart of the man, choosing to beatify Gandhi instead. In this movie, Gandhi is the Mahatma--the "Great Soul"--but never Gandhi the Man.

At the center of the film is Ben Kingsley's riveting performance as Gandi. Kingsley is an Anglo-Indian, born Krishna Banji in 1944 in England. The film took him to India for the first time, yet he ensured that he gave his performance an extra dimension by immersing himself in Gandhi's way of life, like sitting cross-legged on a mat, following his diet and practising yoga.

The flick was created before the era of computer-generated images, yet the film's brilliantly directed and photographed, movingly told, and convincingly performed by an exceptional cast.

Shot mostly on location in India, it features thousand of real extras with lavish details. With Gandi, Attenborough proved that epics on the scale of Ben Hur were still possible in the eighties, and that historical epics would always have a place in cinema.

In the film, however, Gandhi's assassination seems to come out of the blue--we're not told that there was a bombing attempt on his life just a few weeks earlier.

Reading between the lines, it's apparent that Gandi's religious openness wasn't anything that most Hindus or Muslims were interested in sharing. Not even his devotion to the cause of India's "untouchables."

Gandhi became a hero to the people of India not because of his elevated spirituality or his enlightened pacifism. They loved him because he took no notice from the British by defying their Anglo-Saxons' rules, and the Indian population bought into his nonviolence program because it worked!

The sad reality is that on the same day that Britain granted India independence, the country was split in two. Jinnah's dream of a Muslim state, Pakistan, was fulfilled.

Attenborough, who'd struggled to make this biopic film for 20 years, sought to resurrect the man for a modern generation. The resulting film won nine Oscars, including Bes Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.

Documentary, history and monumental epic rolled into one.

The film takes us into the life of Pu YI, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty. As a three-year-old he ascends the throne as "Emperor for 10,000," eventhough his empire is unstable and crumbling beyond the palace walls.

Oscar-winning director Bernardo Bertolucci's film was produced at great expense, as he employed a huge cast of extras, and was made entirely on location in China.

It's an exotic and fascinating film that would overwhelms Westeners: eunuchs populate the palace, concubines offer themselves, food tasters control the emperor's nutrition, and doctors study his stool. Individual characters are carefully hidden behind faces covered in stereotypical make up. Pu Yi also remains a stranger, even when he dances the Charleston or climbs into bed with two women at the same time.

Taking him to Manchukuo, where Japanese set up a puppet regime in an effort to oppose communism, Pu Yi becomes a toy in the hand of the new powers, and, ultimately, their victim. He ends up in a Communist re-education camp for ten years, from which he gains an early release, and returns to Beijing as a gardener.

The film is a story without a happy ending. Exploring the evolution of a human subject by depicting the transformation from "a dragon to a butterfly" syndrome, Bertolucci has explored a more intimate world of personal relationships affected by the conflicting worlds of different cultures.

At the end of his life, Pu Yi reduced to a broken man in Mao uniform. Although tragic, one cannot help but feel that somehow he is responsible for his own fate.