Collider writer Jeremy Urquhart has published a ranked list of the ten best epic films of the 1950s, arguing that the decade was pivotal for the genre because technological advances such as widescreen formats and widespread colour filming added new levels of spectacle. The piece matters mainly as a piece of film criticism and cultural retrospective, celebrating a period when the epic became a defining form of Hollywood and world cinema.

To qualify for the list, a film must run longer than two and a half hours and still hold up today. The lower half of the ranking, as far as the text extends, includes The Big Country (1958), a large-scale Western; Kurosawa's partly lost adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1951); the 1954 musical A Star Is Born; and The Ten Commandments (1956), the nearly four-hour biblical epic starring Charlton Heston. The article hints at higher-placed titles, including another Charlton Heston religious epic and a Kurosawa samurai film, without naming them in the available extract.