Word: epical
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...director Rob Marshall, whose first big film was the 2002 musical Chicago, has made this fairy tale into an emotionally sumptuous love story. This intimate epic spans almost two decades, but its script, by Robin Swicord and Doug Wright, never hurries past the telling biographical detail of its four main characters. Nor does the movie's visual splendor ever obscure the furtive, assertive heart beating under the kimono. It's still early in the season of Oscar contenders, but Geisha has a shot to join Chicago as a Best Picture champ...
...Song of Jacob Zulu. Tug Yourgrau's play about the making of a black South African terrorist was raw but unforgettable in Eric Simonson's epic staging, brought to Broadway by Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe. K.Todd Freeman glowed in the title role, Zakes Mokae excelled as several elders, and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the a cappella singing group, served gloriously as a modern Greek chorus...
...Schindler's List An unlikely, enigmatic hero -- a playboy industrialist -- rescues 1,100 Polish Jews from the Holocaust. In retelling this true story, Steven Spielberg's austere but monumental film re-creates, with chilling immediacy, a central horror of 20th century life and death. Epic cinema, tragic drama, it is also an act of remembrance and conscience that ultimately transcends the ordinary critical categories...
...Farewell My Concubine To make this show-biz epic, director Chen Kaige may have risked his professional life. The Chinese authorities first banned the film, then allowed its release after deleting scenes that depicted Maoist torture and pigheadedness. But this half-century panorama of the Peking Opera is at heart a swirling entertainment -- outsize emotions drawn on a vast, colorful canvas -- with a seductive, star-is-born turn by Hong Kong actor Leslie Cheung...
...without a doubt that BoC’s allure is not dependent on their enigmatic aura. “Dayvan Cowboy,” the lead single, features deep, reverberating guitar chords reminiscent of an instrumental Coldplay B-side. Closer “Farewell Fire” is an epic of atonal layering, sustaining its tension even as the music fades into the gentlest of murmurings, and finally, two minutes of pure silence. In “Campfire,” BoC has yet again succeeded in adding warmth to the traditionally sterile genre of electronica. Recordings of the brothers...