Week of August 28-September 3: Ben Hur (1959)

It's a melodrama. It's overacted and overlong. But the lavish costumes and sets (and on-location filming in Rome, Spain, and other real locales) make it nice to look at. And the chariot race is magnificent. Really! I haven't seen the recent Ben-Hur (and I do not intend to), but I suspect that its chariot sequence is largely produced using CGI, and I'm sure it's comparatively lame. Here it's just practical effects and Actual. Freaking. Chariot. Racing. It's about eleven minutes of fast, loud, quick-cut, exciting spectacle. It looks and feels very modern, too--in an otherwise old-fashioned-ish epic.

If you can't handle sitting through the entire three hours and forty minutes, at least skip ahead to the race and prepare to be awed.