The same sturdy conventionality that made Gladiator a hit means that it’s built to last without standing particularly tall. With apologies to Ridley Scott, it holds up fine without echoing into eternity.

| Nov 21, 2024

It is an honorable movie, so are they all honorable movies. But that's not enough. It's not great. It's a disappointment. Caesar hates disappointment, so kill it swiftly and be done.

| Nov 2, 2022

The new film has spectacular fight scenes in dazzling sets and a familiar story about honor and betrayal, courage and cowardice. It's the perfect vehicle for some old-fashioned sword-clanging fun.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 2, 2022

Gladiator delivers everything its title promises. The surprise is that this bold revival of the period "sword-and-sandals" epic does so with solid acting, sure pacing and superior style interspersed with payoff-worthy pathos.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 2, 2022

Crowe effortlessly projects a warrior's intelligence, as well as his unshakable belief in an ideal called Rome. Whenever Gladiator veers into a blind alley, or starts to suffer under the weight of bad writing, he comes along to steer it right.

| Nov 1, 2022

Overall, it's nostalgic fun to see a gladiator picture again, with all the added wizardry of computer animation techniques, but there's not a new thought in the film's head.

| Nov 1, 2022

Gladiator is a terrifically embroiling movie. Like Braveheart, it is in essence a very good cowboy picture, but here there is less myth-making, less historical swaggering, and more clear-cut storytelling of the old-fashioned kind.

| Nov 1, 2022

Ridley Scott does a creditable job re-inventing a long neglected genre, helped in the main by Russell Crowe's brooding presence as the brilliant Roman general, done away with by the dastardly heir to the Imperial throne.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 1, 2022

The combat in the arena is exciting, fast but not overly gruesome -- blood is shed, tigers are unleashed, chariots career around the arena, but it's in a way that empties the gladiatorial spectacle of any sense of excess or extremes.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 1, 2022

Filled with several superbly choreographed action sequences as well as some very modern musings about the workings of democracy, Gladiator Is a real crowd-pleaser -- colorful, beautifully paced, exciting, and effortlessly Big.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 1, 2022

Director Scott has dug deep into his bag of computer-generated imagery tricks and pulled out either the world's coolest video game or a movie that falls in on itself because of its overblown appearance and stilted dialogue.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 31, 2022

The combat sequences are outstanding.

| Aug 29, 2022

Russell Crowe solidly anchors this epic-scale gladiator movie - the first in nearly four decades - by using his burly frame and expressive face to give dimension to what might otherwise have been comic book heroics.

| May 8, 2018

It is monumental movie-making: visually thrilling, technically astonishing, and emotionally engaging.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 28, 2018

The journey of Maximus, from triumph on the battlefield through despair and degradation in slavery and then to a final epiphany in the Colosseum is an exciting one -- and Russell Crowe plays the character with considerable toughness and authority.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 25, 2015

Throughout it all, Crowe maintains a tough, slot-mouthed reticence; he is very persuasive as the superman of the Colosseum.

| Feb 22, 2015

In Russell Crowe, Scott has found an actor who can carry this movie the way Atlas was supposed to carry the globe of the world on his back -- in Crowe's case without stooping.

| Original Score: 2/3 | Feb 22, 2015

Rather than getting lost in the world Scott has created on screen, Scott asks filmgoers to marvel at how he created that world, and how smoothly he succeeds in manipulating us.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 8, 2014

Gladiator is filled with brilliant filmmaking and features outstanding performances, but it's neither profound enough nor pop enough to be great -- it's mournful, serious, beautiful and, finally, pointless.

| Jan 8, 2014

Ridley Scott thrusts us so close to the combat that all we see is a lot of whirling and thrashing, a sword thrust here and there, a spurt of blood, a limb severed. There's hardly a scene that is cleanly and coherently staged in open space.

| Jan 8, 2014