Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

227 minutes, 2012 restored cinema version. Desert spectacle gives way to an increasingly uncomfortable inquiry into the man occupying its centre. Peter O'Toole can make Lawrence's certainty look magnetic and frightening within the same passage. The duration allows military achievement, personal myth and imperial bargaining to complicate one another, while the changes of scale keep this from becoming a single long march. Allow extra time if a screening adds an interval.