20. Immortals (2011)
Featuring the young Henry Cavill as a Theseus who barely gets near a labyrinth, this Hellenic “reimagination” bags precious little deep mythological significance. But visuals ace Tarsem Singh at least gives it a strikingly theatrical and oppressive look. Unforgettable images include the Titans locked into their magical prison like ranks of table-football players, the sotto in su vision of the warring gods at the end and the campest Mount Olympus in cinema – like a gleaming Siegfried and Roy Vegas set.
19. Clash of the Titans (2010)
Modern CGI robs much of the uncanniness from the formerly Ray Harryhausen-masterminded giant scorpion and Medusa sequences in this remake, and the ambling quest drifts too far into generic Lord of the Rings fantasy territory. Praise the gods, then, for post-Voldemort Ralph Fiennes delivering the best on-screen Greek deity ever – all smoke, susurrated dialogue and sibling resentment as Hades.
18. Troy (2004)
No room for the Olympians in a film worshipping at the altar of the god of A-list buffness Brad Pitt, playing the ultimate warrior Achilles. It’s satisfying enough as spectacle, albeit in that heavily CGI’d noughties vein, but the Homeric notion of heroism is almost completely eclipsed by the Hollywood one. Instead of the ill-starred homoerotic bond with Patroclus, we get Achilles storming the Troy beachhead like a one-man Saving Private Ryan.
17. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
A blabbermouthed hero called Ulysses trying to get back to his wife, Penny. Devotional-chanting sirens. John Goodman substituting for the Cyclops as a Ku Klux Klan member with an eye patch. The Coen brothers’ second-stringer may play it loose in shifting Homer from the Mediterranean to the American south – but they wring decent comic mileage out of it. An odyssey so relaxed it’s a wonder the prodigal son returns at all.
16. The Northman (2022)
Strictly speaking a historical work, Robert Eggers’ epic is still steeped in the Norse mythos – for which there’s been little uptake in cinema (unless you count Marvel’s Thor). There’s a mystic hinterland to Amleth’s revenge quest; Willem Dafoe’s jester and Björk’s Scandi-shaman show the way. As the truth about his heritage becomes clear, he has to enter the realm of Hel, in the bowels of a volcano, to confront his destiny. If two blokes slogging it out in a lava field isn’t mythological, what is?
15. The Return (2024)
A touch stiff and theatrical, Uberto Pasolini’s version of Odysseus’s homecoming to Ithaca nonetheless ships weighty themes. With his dried-out Iggy Pop physique, Ralph Fiennes makes a haunted war veteran out of the great wanderer, who is paralysed by his trauma and the perverting effects of violence. No fairytale reunion for him and Penelope (Juliette Binoche) – just a hardcore reckoning that reinforces the circle of carnage.
14. Noah (2014)
It’s tempting to include Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain as a rare Mayan entry. But this Old Testament foray feels more mythic in subject matter and form. Aronofsky musters spurts of fittingly elemental storytelling: the Genesis sequence compacts millions of years of evolution into one of his typical tableau sequences, and he takes a gnostic detour from biblical sources with his tale of the fallen angels. Its eco-commandments, though, unmistakably belong to our times.
13. Black Orpheus (1959)
Lightly self-referential, Marcel Camus’s film weaves a fleet-flooted, sun-kissed dance around the Orpheus and Eurydice tragedy, with Breno Mello as the womanising tram conductor able to make the sun rise with his guitar. Often accused (by Barack Obama, among others) of exoticising Afro-Brazilians, it’s still an infectious plunge into carnival abandon; and then, with bereaved Orfeu descending the staircase of an abandoned missing-persons bureau, into a spiritual underworld.
12. Ne Zha 2 (2025)
Loosely based on 16th-century novel Investiture of the Gods, this blockbuster animation resides on box office Olympus: it’s the highest grossing animation ever worldwide and the fifth highest grossing film overall. Like its more famous contemporary, Journey to the West, a hotch-potch of Chinese mythology, folklore, Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, director Jiaozi extracts from this tangle a furiously entertaining, sublimely animated tale of a demigod tyke trying to defend his village.
11. Die Nibelungen (1924)
Dedicated “to the German people”, the rumour is that Fritz Lang’s two-part version of the national epic poem was Hitler’s preferred comfort watch. Full of lambent high-fantasy imagery and elements later borrowed by Tolkien (lurking dragons, kooky hobbit-like bystanders, invisibility-conferring artefacts), it does indeed feel like a silent-era Lord of the Rings. Der Führer evidently had a child’s taste in heroism: with his preening heroics, harassing a poor old dragon who looks as if he’s strayed out of Fraggle Rock, Siegfried comes across as an arrogant prig.
10. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Not as consistently brilliant as Life of Brian, but the debut Python feature-length still mercilessly skewers the epic mindset essential to all mythological antics. Strange women lobbing around mythical swords, Sir Robin’s overly honest herald, the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, the police belatedly arriving to abruptly call time on the Round Table … take your bathetic pick.
9. Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
This earns its Top 10 placing thanks to Ray Harryhausen’s justifiably iconic stop-motion and other VFX work: the hydra’s-teeth skeleton fight is an intricate showstopper, and Poseidon – seemingly superimposing some bloke in from the local swimming pool – holding open the clashing rocks is charming too. But whisper it: the rest of the film is pretty ropey. Todd Armstrong is a bland Jason, and the Argonauts are a bunch of callow ingrates who blow their five favours from Hera in the first 45 minutes.
8. Gods of Egypt (2016)
Critically sneered at and smote by a race-lifting controversy on release, Alex Proyas’s film is not just a rare outing for Horus, Set and co, but maybe the closest the 21st century has come to the unabashed Harryhausenesque mythological joyride. There’s a proggy excess here that is perfect for the primal alien weirdness of the Egyptian pantheon: the gods bleed gold, Geoffrey Rush’s Ra fights off an apocalyptic chaos dragon every night, the thief hero must dodge black and white cobra-riding dominatrix goddesses.
7. Oedipus Rex (1967)
An elemental, deranged, punk take on Freud’s favourite bedtime story, by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Franco Citti, the pin-up boy for self-fulfilling prophecies, prowls the wastelands as if in a Hellenic spaghetti western before waylaying his own dad, taking the throne in Thebes and marrying his mum, the eyebrowless Jocasta. Unwilling to see the bald truth, the king uses tyranny and repression to hide from it; Pasolini, bookending his fable with a modern-day framing, lambasts the blindness of authority with full Marxist ire.
6. The Green Knight (2021)
“Was it not just a game?” When Groot’s gnarlier brother comes a-calling on Christmas Day with a special proposition for Arthur’s Round Table, David Lowery unpacks the latent pagan severity outside the castle of civilisation in this haunting picaresque. Is the Green Knight’s challenge about testing the mettle of mankind’s moral standards? Or is he here to tell us all that is meaningless in the face of nature? Big questions, that’ll need big Dev Patel chivalry to withstand.
5. Mayabazar (1957)
A venerated Telugu industry classic, this Mahabharata remix is spilling over with pomp and circumstance as a posse of gods and Pandavas try to stop Krishna’s niece, Sasirekha, from marrying a wrong ’un. SV Ranga Rao is a knockout as the demon warlord Ghatotkacha, who hilariously sabotages the nuptials. The special effects – flying weapons annulling one another in mid-air, and self-replenishing feasts – are first-rate for the era. And, just as we are watching them, the deities constantly watch each other, in scrying devices and in staged vignettes; all of existence truly a mid-tiered proscenium.
4. Spirited Away (2001)
While not a straight mythological adaptation (otherwise it would be placed higher), the Hayao Miyazaki classic brims with offbeat borrowings from Shintoism. The susuwatari dustball helpers in the bathhouse are in the lineage of yokai domestic spirits, Haku the demi-human dragon is likely drawn from the Mizuchi river spirit, and chain-smoking witch Yubaba is a spin on the Yama-uba wilderness hag. This teeming folkloric bathhouse is where Studio Ghibli scrubbed up for its finest hour.
3. Clash of the Titans (1981)
The Harryhausen sequences aren’t as impressive as those in Jason and the Argonauts, but the storyline is a huge improvement. That’s partly because of a greater awareness of the classical sensibility in terms of the gods sporting with mortals, with Harry Hamlin’s Perseus moved around like a chess piece by the goddess Thetis. But contemporary influences also chip in, such as Burgess Meredith as a Rocky-esque mentor and Bubo the owl in the sidekick R2-D2 slot. Featuring a greatest hits of the Greek bestiary, including a fruitily pronounced “Krrrr-aken”, it was a Christmas TV staple for a reason.
2. Baahubali (2015/2017)
Trust the nation where polytheism is still a living reality to school the world in myth-making. SS Rajamouli’s two-part Telugu colossus isn’t based on any established body of legend, but its saga of aristocratic foundlings, rival siblings and warring kingdoms is pure Mahabharata fan fiction. Even considering how Indian films routinely amp up banal action fare with mythological trimmings, Rajamouli ramps the valour dial up to 11, then blows the levels out. When the hero’s first act is to carry a cast-iron shrine down a river on his shoulder like an Amazon parcel, and you’ve still got nearly five hours to go, you know you’re in for a treat.
1. Orphée (1950)
The mythological movie can go monumental, like Baahubali, or it can reflect what the ancients knew: that the divine and the eternal inhabit the everyday. “A legend is entitled to be beyond time and place,” opens Jean Cocteau’s take on Orpheus – before opting for smalltown bohemia, with a burnished Jean Marais as a past-his-prime poet on the lookout for sharp new forms. It appears Cocteau may have been a film noir fan: Orphée has prim Eurydice (Marie Déa) expecting a baby at home, but he’s inexorably drawn to the femme fatale (María Casarès) apparently responsible for the death of a fellow poet outside the local cafe.
Its other contemporary correspondences are inspired: the Rolls-Royce radio that tunes Orphée into an infinite ether of inspiration; the domestic parody that replaces Orpheus’ underworld exit, when the easily distracted artist must not look at his wife; the soixante-huitard Bacchantes, led by hip Juliette Gréco, who finally do him in. But this tug of war between art and life also hauls us into its metaphysical netherworld so seamlessly, it continues to echo in other times and places, as true myths should. If David Lynch’s penchant for reverse-speed surrealism doesn’t owe something to Orphée, there can be no doubt about The Matrix’s meniscus mirrors. All gratifying confirmation for Cocteau of art’s primacy – though even he leaves the door ajar for life at the very end.
