Still a first-class epic

Rating: 10/10 (10 June 2002)

This was the first movie I ever saw (what persuaded my father to take his five-year-old son into New York to see a four-hour Biblical epic is beyond me, although I do remember there was plenty of hype about it - I even had a Ben-Hur coloring book), and although some of the special effects look a little cheesy these days, and Charlton Heston's performance is so strained and over-the-top that it's sometimes unwatchable, this is still a first-class epic. And whereas much of the visual grandeur in "Gladiator" is computer-generated, the sets in "Ben-Hur" are all demonstrably real, making this the most expensive (and most lucrative) film of its time.