

But the real draw in Lawrence of Arabia is the astounding scope and spectacle, all shot in an era before the kind of digital effects that give Dune its grandeur. Peter O’Toole’s performance as Lawrence has an eternal adventurer appeal: He’s an overgrown boy charging through a fascinating world, ignoring the adults who tell him no. Lean’s film - much like Dune, the book and movie - is an epic about forbidding and lethal landscapes, dense politics and violent prejudices, and a culture of desert survivors who resist outside rule but embrace foreigners who aren’t too proud to learn from them and accept their ways. Lawrence documented his life and his part in the 1916 Great Arab Revolt in his 1926 autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a bestseller that may glamorize his role as a bridge between the Bedouin people and the British, but does tell an appealing story of an outsider finding a home far outside his culture. Image: Columbia Pictures via Everett CollectionĬast: Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinnįans of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune may experience a little double vision if they dive into David Lean’s gloriously sprawling, Oscar-dominating 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia in the 2020s: Dune the novel and Lawrence the movie were heavily based on the same book, and they have a great deal in common.


The best movies on Netflix UK Lawrence of Arabia

See Castle in the Sky at the right age and its imagery and feelings will stay with you forever, but then you could say that about most Miyazaki films (and the entire Studio Ghibli catalog is available to peruse on Netflix in the U.K.). On its own merits, this steampunk tale of a young miner and a mysterious girl falling in with a band of air pirates as they search for the mythical flying island of Laputa might be Miyazaki’s most purely thrilling adventure, with some of his most breathtaking aerial scenes (which, for a director so obsessed with capturing the sensation of flight, is really saying something). The Zelda series has always been strongly influenced by Miyazaki in its elegiac tone and some of its character designs (think of the cute, rattling little Koroks), but Castle in the Sky is a particularly clear blueprint for Tears of the Kingdom especially, with its city populated by ancient robots floating in the clouds, high above grassy plains. Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky opened in Japan in 1986, the same year that Nintendo released the first Legend of Zelda game - and in the month that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes out, there’s no better film to pair with it than the Studio Ghibli anime classic. Cast: Mayumi Tanaka, Keiko Yokozawa, Kotoe Hatsui
