Cleopatra

Taylor, Burton, and Harrison are sublime in this sweeping epic of love and nations. Read full review

The film is absolutely beautiful, with some of the most gorgeous sets and images ever committed to celluloid. The three main actors are just incredible - the first two hours are carried almost solely on Rex Harrison's charisma and screen presence. Later, Burton perfectly portrays a deeply flawed man who will do whatever is necessary for love. Elizabeth Taylor anchors the entire film. Read full review

Cleopatra is not only a supercolossal eye-filler (the unprecedented budget shows in the physical opulence throughout), but it is also a remarkably literate cinematic recreation of an historic epoch. Read full review

Joseph L Mankiewicz's four-hour Cleopatra is a stately but sometimes mindboggling spectacle. The central moment is the queen's jawdropping entry into Rome, for which Mankiewicz creates a sensational Busby Berkeley fantasy, like the world's biggest Olympic opening ceremony. Read full review

Cleopatra is not a great movie. But it is primarily a vast, popular entertainment that sidesteps total greatness for broader appeal. This is not an adverse criticism, but a notation of achievement. Read full review

Forget the length of time it took to make it and all the tattle of troubles they had, including the behavior of two of its spotlighted stars. The memorable thing about this picture is that it is a surpassing entertainment, one of the great epic films of our day. By virtue of brilliant staging, Mr. Mankiewicz keeps this well-known tale moving with visual excitements that increase the dramatic flow and give extraordinary insights into the characters. Read full review

Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra is put together of the stuff of legend that the director experienced as personal reality, and he filmed the story as if he had been there. The film may be as close as Hollywood gets, outside the realm of Orson Welles, to a cinematic simulacrum of Shakespeare, less in its lucidly incisive, rhetorically reserved images than in its blend of coruscating language, rowdy comedy, and grand yet urgent and intimate performances. Read full review

This super-gargantuan historical drama may not be much of a movie, but it delivers Hollywood spectacle of the sort we’ll never see again. Read full review

Cleopatra is, disappointingly, neither a visionary masterpiece nor a fascinating catastrophe, but something altogether more banal: an unusually intimate epic that falls very flat. Read full review

This is not a film---it's a deal, decorated with extensive publicity, but weighed down by listless direction and lots of nasal talk, talk, talk. Read full review

Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) was brought in to salvage the runaway production (with the cost adjusted for inflation, it may still qualify for the title of Most Expensive Movie Ever Made); though his name stands alone on the credits, a lot of other hands contributed to the general muddle. Read full review

Running at just over four hours, it is as spectacular, lush and extravagant as the studio would have liked its audience to believe. But it also has moments of mind-numbing boredom as the plot,– slowed by extraneous dialogue, drags from Egypt to Rome. Read full review

As drama and as cinema, Cleopatra is raddled with flaws. It lacks style both in image and in action. Never for an instant does it whirl along on wings of epic elan; generally it just bumps from scene to ponderous scene on the square wheels of exposition. Read full review

It is not even bad enough to be perversely amusing. Liz's first entrance is grotesque enough to prepare us for that high point of self-parody when she asks Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) if he smells anything burning as the library of Alexandria goes up in smpke, but there are not enough of these pungent moments to relieve the soul-destroying tedium of little people lost on big sets in the most expensive session of hide-and-seek ever to masquerade as a movie. [20 June 1963, p.13]