Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages

D.W. Griffith's staggering, impossible, magnificent folly — the most ambitious film ever attempted in 1916, and one of the most ambitious ever attempted, period. Stung by criticism of The Birth of a Nation's racism, Griffith responded with a three-and-a-half-hour epic intercutting four separate stories across 2,500 years of history: ancient Babylon, the life of Christ, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Renaissance France, and a modern-day melodrama about labor strikes and social reform. The Babylonian sequences alone, featuring some of the largest sets ever constructed, are worth the price of admission. The film's structure — all four stories building to simultaneous climaxes, cut faster and faster in a mounting crescendo — was decades ahead of its time. Commercially ruinous and artistically revolutionary, it remains one of cinema's most awe-inspiring experiences.