Lawrence of Arabia

David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia opened in December 1962 and won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography. The 228-minute restored director's cut is the standard version. Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson adapted the screenplay from T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the production took two years of shooting across Jordan, Spain and Morocco.

In 1916 the British Army officer T. E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole, in the role that made him a star at twenty-eight) is sent to assess Prince Faisal's revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Drawn ever deeper into the desert and the Arab cause, he plans the assault on Aqaba across the Sinai and the harassment of the Hejaz Railway, and becomes a folk hero. Alec Guinness as Faisal, Anthony Quinn as Auda abu Tayi, Omar Sharif (in the role that launched his career) as Sherif Ali and Jack Hawkins as General Allenby make up one of the great supporting ensembles in all of classical cinema.

Freddie Young's 70mm Super Panavision photography changed for good how cinema imagines the desert, and Maurice Jarre's score has lasted as well as any ever written for film. The politics (its orientalism, its reading of Lawrence's psychology, its handling of the Sykes-Picot betrayal) have been argued over for decades, but nobody has ever seriously questioned its artistry.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: This is the greatest historical epic ever made, and every epic since has been measured against it. Three hours of cinema of a kind that gets made once a generation, if that.