**Part of the Best Picture Project**

Cracking at the brim with social criticism of Texan society, Giant is a sprawling epic that tells the story of the conflict between a Texas rancher, his family, and his ex ranch hand.

Giant is admittedly a bit too long for its own good, but it is still an enthralling film featuring great performances by leads Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean. The rivalry here between Hudson and Dean is so strong that it is hard to pick who is the better of the two, but both equip themselves with graceful acting. Taylor, meanwhile, remains the most sympathetic of the cast,

Gorgeously filmed and well told, Giant is an epic film well worth investing your time in.

I got to the end of the first side of the double sided disc and realised I had watched the second half first. That should have been a very difficult mistake to make (even with a blank double sided disc) but this film was so plodding that I didn't notice, even though I had wondered about Elizabeth Taylor's greying hair. Then I watched the first half, it added nothing to the monotony of the second half of the film.
Jams Dean was pretty good, the rest of the story was tedious - this tale of a Texan rancher, his family, feuds with a neighbour and oil didn't interest me. Perhaps its appeal is better understood in its home country?

Rambling and overlong... but my God, how good was James Dean? In this movie, damn good; in the larger sense, we'll never know.

**Part of the Best Picture Project**

Cracking at the brim with social criticism of Texan society, Giant is a sprawling epic that tells the story of the conflict between a Texas rancher, his family, and his ex ranch hand.

Giant is admittedly a bit too long for its own good, but it is still an enthralling film featuring great performances by leads Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean. The rivalry here between Hudson and Dean is so strong that it is hard to pick who is the better of the two, but both equip themselves with graceful acting. Taylor, meanwhile, remains the most sympathetic of the cast,

Gorgeously filmed and well told, Giant is an epic film well worth investing your time in.

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Reviewed in my coverage of the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival >>

I actually liked it more than I thought I would -- the story was 'not my taste' and more tedious and rambling than I feared, but there are some great performances here, chief among them James Dean's, which was nothing short of fantastic. Anyone who watched 'Rebel Without A Cause' and wondered what the fuss was about, if he was really a good actor and not just a teen heartthrob, will have their question answered here, making his untimely death and the thought of his unfulfilled potential that much more tragic.

another brilliant elizabeth taylor performance.
pretty much an older 'there will be blood'

I don't know that there's necessarily a problem with Giant. Maybe that was an overstatement. As a soap opera, it has more than its share of weak subplots. As a precaution, Stevens made the film nearly four hours long. A film like this, that spans three decades in a couple of lives, at nearly four hours, feels strangely mis-pitched. Yes, a long movie should go with a long amount of screen time. Yes, the actors should age in their acting and their personas as well as their hair and skin. What's really powerful about the film is that it has such a bracing stop-start motion to it. You really pay attention when Dean is in misery towards the end of the film. Even the stark, out-of-place anti-racist sentiments in the film seem to reward the viewer in that guilty, melodramatic fashion. Dean is the best part of the film.

A great family epic that gave way to "The Godfather"