There isn’t a single defining quality that marks the difference between a great movie and an all-out masterpiece. The latter transcends the boundaries of its genre entirely, delivering groundbreaking truths about the human condition that remain timeless across generations. But often, no matter how much of a masterpiece a motion picture is, it’s still so heavy that it’s undeniably tough to get through.

Likewise, there are many factors that can make a cinematic masterpiece feel heavy. Whether it’s because it’s emotionally devastating, because it has a runtime and sense of pacing that demand patience, or because it’s bleak and pessimistic, a heavy film can nevertheless be counted among the greatest masterpieces in movie history. These ten gems, ranked from worst to best, prove it.

10

‘An Elephant Sitting Still’ (2018)

Image via KimStim

Nearly four hours long, the Chinese arthouse drama An Elephant Sitting Still is definitely not for everyone; but all those looking for an absolutely fascinating slow-burner ought to give this masterpiece a chance at least once in their lives. It’s also, however, one of the most depressing movies of the last 10 years, which adds another layer of challenge to an already impenetrable movie.

Even still, the inaccessibility of this slice-of-life anti-drama is the whole point, since the film is all about the suffocating sense of meaninglessness and isolation of life with depression. Directed Hu Bo, who was only 29 years old when he finished the movie, suffered from depression himself. Shortly after finishing the film, he took his own life. It’s a background that only adds further weight to an already incredibly heavy movie, but it also adds another reason to witness the incredible legacy that Bo left behind.

9

‘A Woman Under the Influence’ (1974)

Image via Faces Distribution

Though he was also an actor, Nick Cassavetes was particularly important as a director, one of the most important voices of independent cinema during the New Hollywood movement. His biggest masterpiece from that period is almost undoubtedly A Woman Under the Influence, one of Gena Rowlands‘ most essential movies, where she delivers what’s by far one of the greatest acting performances of 20th-century cinema.

It’s largely Rowlands’ powerhouse performance as a housewife exhibiting signs of severe mental distress that makes A Woman Under the Influence such an emotionally heavy film. Its depiction of mental illness, marital troubles, and the pressure of patriarchal societal expectations on both men and women is so raw, exhibiting Cassavetes’ usual commitment to realism, that it’s not an easy feat to get through all 2-and-a-half hours of this masterpiece’s runtime.

8

‘Incendies’ (2010)

Image via Entertainment One

By now, Denis Villeneuve is widely praised as one of the greatest filmmakers currently working in Hollywood, but even the greats have to start somewhere. In Villeneuve’s case, that was his native Canada. There, he made Incendies, one of the greatest Canadian movies of all time. It’s the country’s highest-rated film of all time on Letterboxd by a decent margin, and for good reason.

A harrowing exploration of the cyclical nature of violence and trauma, complete with one of the most shocking plot twists in the modern history of cinema, Incendies is not for the faint of heart. Far more than just a family mystery, it’s a thematically sharp and emotionally profound experience that you just can’t shake, one of the films that best depict the brutality of war.

7

‘Oldboy’ (2003)

Image via Tartan Films

Park Chan-wook is one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of South Korean cinema, and his Vengeance Trilogy is one of the best R-rated movie trilogies of all time. As phenomenal as its predecessor and successor are, however, there’s really no question regarding which is the best installment of the three: It has to be Oldboy, based on the Japanese manga Old Boy by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi.

This action thriller is packed with some of the most thrilling action set pieces and most shocking plot twists in the history of the genre, but one of those twists is particularly brutal. It’s a reveal that recontextualizes the entire film, making rewatches more of a daunting challenge—however tempting—than an inviting comfort watch. As brutal and emotionally heavy as the rest of the film is, it’s that final twist that really makes Oldboy such a relentlessly gut-wrenching experience.

6

‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)

Image via Paramount Pictures

Paul Thomas Anderson has been making some of the greatest motion pictures of his generation for years, but when the conversation is about what his best work to date is, there tends to be agreement: It has to be There Will Be Blood, the period drama where Daniel Day-Lewis delivers what some still think is the greatest acting performance of the 21st century thus far.

Even aside of its exceptional cast, however, There Will Be Blood is one of the most perfect movies of the last 30 years, with some of the strongest writing and most impressive production values of any PTA masterpiece. But with its slow pacing, oppressively dark atmosphere, unrelenting misanthropy, and Day-Lewis’ terrifying performance, it may also very well be the heaviest movie in its director’s body of work.

5

‘Se7en’ (1995)

David Fincher is the modern Master of Suspense, and he has directed several of the greatest thrillers of any filmmaker from his generation—chief among which is Se7en. In almost 30 years, it hasn’t ceased to be deeply admirable that such a bleak and pessimistic movie became a blockbuster that grossed over $300 million dollars at the box office worldwide. Indeed, it’s one of the scariest mystery movies ever made.

It’s such a terrifying film, in fact, that some may even consider it part of the horror genre, placing it next to icons of the genre like The Silence of the Lambs as one of the best crime horror movies ever. At no point does Se7en give the audience room to truly breathe; on the contrary, it only keeps growing more oppressive and cynical as the runtime keeps progressing, concluding with one of the most harrowing third acts in the history of Hollywood cinema.

4

‘Schindler’s List’ (1993)

Image via Universal Pictures

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As well-known as he is for his work in the realm of blockbusters, which he pretty much brought to life, Steven Spielberg happens to have made his magnum opus in the form of a World War II drama that’s not a blockbuster at all. Because as enormous of a box office hit as it was, Schindler’s List was clearly not designed as a crowd-pleaser, and it still remains the most depressing movie that Spielberg has made thus far.

Nevertheless, it’s one of the best biopics of all time, with one of John Williams‘ most haunting scores and a phenomenal cast whose every member is at the top of their game. Films about the Holocaust are always incredibly heavy and harrowing movies, but Schindler’s List in particular is so raw and relentless in its depiction of the subject matter that it stands out among its peers. It’s not all doom and gloom, however, with Spielberg being able to find surprising amounts of humanity and hope even in such a dark story.

3

‘City of God’ (2002)

Image via Miramax Films

The world of Latin American cinema is one filled to the brim with underappreciated masterpieces, and Brazil’s filmography is no exception; but City of God is no underappreciated masterpiece. Rather, as one of the highest-rated films of all time on both Letterboxd and IMDb, it’s almost universally recognized to be one of those crime movies that are perfect from the first scene to the last.

City of God shows life on the slums of Rio with unparalleled rawness, finding ample shock value to barrage the audience with. At the same time, however, it never feels like it’s sensationalizing its subject, but rather treating it with all the sensitivity and realism that it deserves. As brutal as it is emotionally weighty, City of God is nevertheless one of those masterpieces that every film fan should watch at least once in their lives.

2

‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’ (1928)

Image via Société Générale des Films

Learning to understand and appreciate the silent days of cinema takes time and some degree of work; but once you get there, the window opens up to several of the most artistically gifted filmmakers in the art form’s history. One such artist is Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose The Passion of Joan of Arc is far and away one of the most intense silent movies of all time.

The story of the titular saint was already an incredibly dense, intense, and heavy story on paper, but the many ways that Dreyer finds to elevate all of those qualities in his 1928 masterpiece is truly admirable. Visually striking, perfectly paced, and anchored by Maria Falconetti delivering what may very well be the greatest female acting performance in cinema’s history, The Passion of Joan of Arc is unexpectedly moving for a movie that has no dialogue.

1

‘Come And See’ (1985)

Image via Sovexportfilm

Calling Elem Klimov‘s gut-wrenching Soviet masterpiece Come And See one of the heaviest World War II movies of all time would be kind of an understatement. The fourth-highest-rated feature film of all time on Letterboxd, this war drama is one of countless films that depict how war destroys innocence through the eyes of a child protagonist; but no movie with such a premise executes it with quite as much quasi-surreal horror as Come And See.

Indeed, this may not be a horror movie, but it sure feels like one more often than not. Loud, nightmarish in tone, and unrelentingly committed to the utmost realism, the film is absolutely relentless in its barraging the audience with constant noise, pain, death, and trauma. It’s definitely the kind of war movie that demands a strong stomach, but those courageous enough to watch it will be treated to one of the most admirable cinematic masterpieces in history.

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Come And See

Release Date

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October 17, 1985

Runtime

142 Minutes

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Director

Elem Klimov

Writers

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Elem Klimov, Ales Adamovich

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The iconic comedy that gave us “bend and snap!” lives on!

Released in 2001, Legally Blonde follows Reese Witherspoon‘s Elle Woods, a sorority girl who is dumped by her boyfriend who thinks he’s too good for her. In an effort to prove him wrong and win him back, she hits the books and is accepted to Harvard. Luke Wilson (Emmett Richmond), Jennifer Coolidge (Paulette Bonafonte), Selma Blair (Vivian Kensington), Matthew Davis (Warner Huntington III) and many more appear in the now-iconic film.

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Two years after the release of the original film, Witherspoon returned in Legally Blonde 2, which followed her character’s journey as an animal rights activist. A musical adaptation hit the stage in 2007 and Witherspoon coproduced a spinoff called Legally Blondes, starring twin sisters Milly and Becky Rosso playing Elle’s younger cousins.

Plus, Legally Blonde 3 is underway. Written by Mindy Kaling and Dan Goor, very little details are known about the future film besides the release date of May 2022. Witherspoon is set to return as Elle Woods once more.

Remembered for the optimistic protagonist and a message that digs below the surface, Legally Blonde has remained relevant for years. While waiting for the release of the third movie, keep scrolling to see what the cast has been up to since the original film.

Books certainly aren’t restricted the way movies generally are, though there are definitely experimental films that run for far longer than two hours. But books can be hundreds and hundreds of pages long, and some are in the 1000-to-2000-page range before the notion of splitting things into volumes has to be considered, which makes the time commitment to reading some books much more like watching a multi-season TV show or a lengthy video game than watching a film.

So, there are probably more ambitious and overall gargantuan books than there are movies. Some are classics, including a bunch below. There’s a mix of older and some slightly newer works here, but they’re included because they’re all among the most ambitious books of all time, with a lot of ground covered, so many words to read, and – for most of them – approximately 1000 or so pages you’ll need to physically turn to get through everything.

10

‘Les Misérables’ (1862)

Image via Penguin Classics

To start with an easy and obvious pick, here’s Les Misérables, which is famous for being very long and very heavy-going. There are almost two decades covered, with fictional characters existing and struggling during a tumultuous time in French history; namely, from the mid-1810s until the June Rebellion in Paris, which took place in 1832 (so not part of the French Revolution of the late 1700s, though that mistake does sometimes get made).

If you want to be flippant, you could also say Les Misérables is a novel about a guy who steals a loaf of bread, and then miserable (or misérable?) things happen. There are some tangents, lots of side characters and subplots, and just a lot of stuff that feels sprawling in general, but it is all rewarding and interesting, even if there are parts that don’t necessarily focus on the main plot, nor the truly “main” characters. It’s a classic for good reason, and one of those books everyone seems to agree, uncontroversially, is an essential one as far as world literature is concerned.

9

‘House of Leaves’ (2000)

Image via Doubleday

House of Leaves is written and presented in a way that’s meant to make you feel like you’re going more than a little mad, and it’s also impressively layered, to say the least. There are a few different accounts of a documentary called “The Navidson Record,” with analysis of the contents of said documentary being covered throughout, and it’s mostly about a house with a mortifying secret (or some kind of portal) inside.

There’s a lot more to it than it being a haunted house novel, though, with some parts of House of Leaves also being weirdly funny, other parts being just weird, and even more parts that manage to be scary in ways that aren’t necessarily related to “The Navidson Record.” It’s a probably unadaptable beast of a book that finds so many interesting and unique things to do with certain horror conventions, and stands as the kind of thing you do need to read if you want to believe it (and even then, believing might remain somewhat difficult).

8

‘Underworld’ (1997)

Image via Scribner

If Underworld progressed in chronological order, it would still qualify as quite ambitious, what with it being dense, covering a great deal of history (much of the second half of the 20th century), and being lengthy, at over 800 pages. Structurally, though, it’s all those things plus something told largely in reverse, starting with a story about a prized baseball from a match in the early 1950s, and then jumping forward to the 1990s.

It’s about people who had – or wanted to have – that baseball in their possession, but everything keeps jumping back, and though there are some people in it who are sort of main characters, Underworld goes off on tangents fairly often. It does so in a way that works unusually well, with there being something powerful about the novel overall, even if it sometimes feels hard to say just what exactly makes it feel such a way.

7

‘The Second World War’ (2012)

Image via Weidenfeld & Nicolson

The ambition here goes a little further than you might expect, since The Second World War covers some events that happened in the lead-up to 1939, which was the “official” start of World War II. It’s a way to set things up before the bulk of the book focuses on a very complex, sizable, and world-shattering event, with about as much detail as you can get when you’re doing only one book on the whole subject.

There are 50 chapters all up, and they’re about a whole range of different battles, events, and developments within the overall conflict. If you want more than an overview, it would, naturally, be better to find books that focus on a more specific part of the Second World War, but for a breathless recount of so much that happened during the biggest – and most impactful – event of the 20th century, you do get that here, condensed into a single book, which is undoubtedly impressive.

6

‘Against the Day’ (2006)

Image via Penguin Press

Having a one book per author limit here makes things a bit difficult, because there’s an argument to be made that Gravity’s Rainbow is Thomas Pynchon’s most ambitious book, owing to it being his densest, or maybe Mason & Dixon, since that one is so stylistically surprising and singular. Both of them are long and sprawling for sure, but Against the Day is longer than either, and it feels like more of a conventional epic.

Well, a conventional epic in the sense that it spans a good deal of time and has many characters, but then the rest of it’s quite unconventional in the way you can usually rely on a Pynchon novel to be. It’s a work of historical fiction that spans 1893 to 1918, and has countless characters, some borderline fantasy/sci-fi elements, and cameos from real-life figures throughout. Against the Day is often bewildering and a bit exhausting, but it’s also extremely impressive and, for the most part, rather rewarding, if you’ve got the time and patience for it.

5

‘Infinite Jest’ (1996)

Image via Little, Brown and Company

Infinite Jest is a psychological something of a novel. Not really a psychological thriller, but maybe a psychological dramedy would be the best way to describe it? Even then, it’s kind of a mystery just because of how confounding it is, and how little certain things seem to line up with everything else. You’re also dealing with non-chronological storytelling here, and a massive number of characters, with some of them being residents at a drug and alcohol recovery program, others being members of a tennis academy, and some other people being radicals/revolutionaries.

And that’s before getting to the fact that Infinite Jest is over 1000 pages long (the font is small, and the style is such that most pages are filled with text), plus there’s all the footnotes to take into account, because they’re about the length of a short novel on their own. You need two bookmarks and probably about 30 hours (at a minimum) to read a book like this, and then re-reads are necessary if you want to even come close to getting a grip on most of it. As for understanding all of it… if you want to dedicate your life to reading and analyzing Infinite Jest, sure. No, not sure. Maybe. Godspeed.

4

‘Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy’ (2007)

Image via W. W. Norton & Company

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Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the longest book here, at over 1600 pages, and it’s also a hefty-sized book with so many words per page. By comparison, the Kindle version of Reclaiming History (which doesn’t have to worry about being bound), is 5,919 pages, though that surely includes the approximately 1000 pages of footnotes. If you want to see them after buying a physical copy of the book, you can, but they come on a CD with each physical copy.

So, 2600 pages, and those pages have the number of words you’d probably find on two pages of a more regularly formatted book. And so many of those pages exist to refute every single conspiracy theory regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with a decent chunk of those pages also serving as a comprehensive overview of the event itself, and the chaotic/eventful days that immediately followed. It’s exhaustive, but perhaps the ultimate resource for covering just about everything you could want from a book on the subject (there are fictional and even sci-fi-related stories about it, sure, but this is arguably the definitive non-fiction book about the event).

3

‘The Stand’ (1978/1990)

Image via Doubleday

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There are two versions of The Stand, and they both tell the same story, but the 1990 uncut version is much longer, and it shifts the events of the story forward by a decade. You got either an 800-ish-page-long book about a flu wiping out most of humanity and a battle for the human race’s future, or a book that’s about 1200 pages long about the same thing.

Stephen King went all out for both, since The Stand (1978) was easily his most ambitious book at the time, and remained so until arguably IT (1986), but then The Stand (1990) outdid IT, in terms of page-count and scale, so it’s about as big as a Stephen King book has gotten. There are other beefy ones, of course, and if you were to count The Dark Tower as one cohesive story, then that would technically be his biggest and most sweeping epic to date, given there are seven main books that make up the overall continuous story in that series, all of them published over a period of a bit over 20 years.

2

‘The Lord of the Rings’ (1954–1955)

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The one book that will rank ahead of The Lord of the Rings here is a work of historical fiction, but then again, The Lord of the Rings almost is, too. It’s just a history that’s entirely fictional, and there’s an argument to be made that J.R.R. Tolkien inventing it all and planning everything so thoroughly, all the while doing more by way of world-building than just about anyone ever, is more astounding than doing a more conventional work of historical fiction.

There’s a narrative here about a war that’s building while two Hobbits undertake a dangerous journey to destroy a very important Ring, but there’s also so much more to The Lord of the Rings than just the main narrative. It could be only the narrative, and it would still be a classic, but it’s the way Tolkien makes Middle-earth feel so convincing and tangible that makes The Lord of the Rings particularly special. As corny as it might sound, you can almost believe that Middle-earth did really exist, at some point. Tolkien does an outstanding job at maintaining – and building upon – that illusion, so to speak.

1

‘War and Peace’ (1869)

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War and Peace feels a little in line, ambition-wise, with Les Misérables, and they were both published in the same decade, too. War and Peace involves Russian history, though, even if France does factor into the plot and some of the conflict, seeing as War and Peace takes place during the Napoleonic Wars, and there’s a similar amount of time covered in Les Misérables, going from about 1805 to 1820, rather than that previously mentioned novel’s span of 1815 to 1832.

There are stretches of War and Peace that aren’t too narrative-focused, with Leo Tolstoy using some of his 1200+ pages to unpack history and philosophical ideas, too. Like with Les Misérables, it’s all compelling and well-written, so he more than gets away with it. War and Peace is famously huge, and beyond iconic, as an epic… maybe even the ultimate epic, so here it is, trumping all the other books, and standing, arguably, as the most ambitious piece of literature of all time.

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War and Peace

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Release Date

March 14, 1966

Runtime

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393 Minutes

Director

Sergey Bondarchuk

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Writers

Sergey Bondarchuk, Vasiliy Solovyov, Leo Tolstoy

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