It's impossible to separate cinematographer Freddie Young's exquisite visual flair from the crux of this heroic study of T.E. Lawrence (played by Peter O'Toole)-both rely on mirages. For Academy Award–winning Young, this is a magnificent study of a monumental desert, radiating great waves of pitiless heat. For director David Lean and writer Robert Bolt, their historical protagonist has forsaken his identity as writer and diplomat to become a desert warrior camel-cavorting through the dunes of destiny, another kind of mirage. Successive restorations of this 70mm spectacle have been topped by an exotic 8K scan with every grain of sand accounted for.