Cleopatra is a piece of overcooked lunacy.

| Jan 2, 2024

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

| Feb 11, 2020

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

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

It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience, for good and ill.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 9, 2013

Sad to say, however, the deep-revolving, witty Mankiewicz fails most where most he hoped to succeed. As drama and as cinema, Cleopatra is raddled with flaws. It lacks style both in image and in action.

| Mar 23, 2011

For four hours this moody, glossy pantomime leadenly plods on, saying much more about the hubris and excess of old-time Hollywood thinking than the burnished glories of an ancient world.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 5, 2008

[A] general muddle.

| May 5, 2008

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.

| Sep 5, 2007

Harrison, doing his waspish don act as Caesar, alone rises above mediocrity.

| Feb 9, 2006

It is a surpassing entertainment, one of the great epic films of our day.

| May 9, 2005

Power and passion are the twin and intertwined themes of Cleopatra, and they have never burned with greater intensity or amid such opulence as they do in this extraordinary film.

| Dec 30, 2003

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

| Mar 10, 2003