Directed by Raúl Ruiz | 267 mins | 2010
It is a rare thing for one of a filmmaker’s final works to rank among their greatest, and their most classically sumptuous—but such is the case with Ruiz’s sweeping, four-and-a-half-hour-long adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco’s novel of the same name, published in 1854. Beginning with the plight of João, an apparent orphan who discovers that he’s from noble stock, the film expands to accommodate an ensemble of Dickensian proportions and intrigues to scale.