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Stanley Kubrick's only film as a hired hand--and by far his most conventional and least Kubrickian as a result--Spartacus nevertheless fills the wide screen gloriously, if for a bit longer than necessary. This three-hour-plus 1960 epic about a slave (Kirk Douglas, who also executive produced) who leads a revolt against the Roman Empire is marred by long stretches of dramatic inertia, most of them courtesy of Dalton Trumbo's static script. But there's ample compensation in the magnificently staged scenes of battle and gladiatorial combat, Russell Metty's Oscar-winning cinematography, and the delicious performances of Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton as scheming rival senators. Not to mention the ancillary pleasure of Tony Curtis, in perhaps the last of his Last of the Brooklyn Ancients miscastings, as Antoninus, "a singah of sawngs."