With a nod to our July 17 opening of Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY, we started with the intention of giving over this summer’s Weekend Classics to the “Big Screen Epic” — defined traditionally as a lavish grand-scale form of storytelling replete with historical significance amid sweeping landscape in a world of adventure and spectacle — often to the sitting time of roughly three hours or more. We might have taken a few liberties with that definition. 

Can one deny the travails of Céline and Julie, the inner workings of a filmmaker on the trail of a Union soldier, or the grizzled landscape of faces on display in a Sergio Leone Western as anything else? 

Enough with the justifications, because it’s hot out there. What we have here are a chain of long summer sits — of both the external and internal variety… Come in, escape the heat, and be transported to lands of the far and near; the outside and the vast inside. Or just take a load off.