The events have no pressure behind them: instead of erupting out of the upheavals of three powerfully exciting and self-willed personalities, they seem to be happening because the extras and the sets are there.

| Mar 6, 2024

Cleopatra is a piece of overcooked lunacy.

| Jan 2, 2024

The difficulty for the performer of getting out from under the scenery, the sets, the costumes and the colour and making an impression not as a member of the cast but as an actor (or actress) is severe.

| Aug 8, 2022

I must report that this film is at best a major disappointment, at worst an extravagant exercise in tedium.

| Aug 8, 2022

Far from the sumptuous sets that reproduce antiquity with a certain authenticity, 'Cleopatra' is an epic spectacle to which I find nothing but an erratic and artificious result in its four hours and eleven minutes of length. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 2, 2021

As the sets seem to grow bigger and bigger, so progressively the players dwindle.

| Feb 11, 2020

Worth a look.... for a single performance: Rex Harrison as Caesar.

| Feb 5, 2020

Rex Harrison is the undisputed hit of the show as a subtle and sardonic Julius Caesar...

| Oct 7, 2019

The spectacular scenes were confused and oddly minuscule... Still and all, there was Elizabeth Taylor. At first I was disappointed, a large statement considering my expectations. Then I realized what she was up to and didn't regret my $1.25.

| Aug 13, 2019

To watch this film is to see the Hollywood story itself.

| Aug 16, 2017

It may not be as compelling and tightly edited as Ben-Hur, but Cleopatra is still a Hollywood epic that tells a grand story in a grand way. Save it for a night when the family feels like a four-hour spectacle.

| Original Score: B | Mar 30, 2016

...a tale of two men being manipulated, and possibly loved, by a powerful and conflicted woman.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 11, 2016

Four-hour visual stunner requires patience, maturity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 25, 2014

Taylor inhabits the role with a focussed but uninhibited imperiousness, as when she turns Cleopatra's entrance into Rome, aboard a giant rolling sphinx, into the ultimate red-carpet photo op.

| Oct 6, 2014

The film has a spectacular variety of liabilities (and, to be fair, strengths as well), but the most visible and crushing is that's an utter dud as a star vehicle.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Aug 2, 2014

A lumbering monstrosity of a movie with all manner of preposterous hairstyles and improbable fashions. Worth seeing -- once anyway -- at least as wayward legend.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 15, 2014

Though it owes as much to Shakespeare's interpretation and to Roman propaganda as to the historical record, this interpretation of the great queen's life succeeds in conveying something of the intelligence and force of personality her opponents feared.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 19, 2013

The film at least manages to make some sense of an extraordinary moment in history, as Rome expanded from republic to empire.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 12, 2013

A stately but sometimes mindboggling spectacle.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 11, 2013

Melodramatic, and camp as Christmas, but nothing like the disaster its reputation suggests.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 11, 2013