Attacked relentlessly as heretical at its release, Martin Scorsese's fictional rumination on Jesus' inner life is actually a fairly staid interpretation -- and barely less bloody than Mel Gibson's.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 30, 2024

The Last Temptation of Christ ... is a movie that matters.

| Jul 19, 2024

...shockingly potent, leaving me in tears...

| Dec 27, 2022

Scorsese and Schrader have made a courageous film that people of all religions or no religion should be able to watch with identical fascination.

| Dec 7, 2022

The film is a fine and powerful statement of religious and political conviction.

| Sep 14, 2022

A marvelous film…more genuinely Christian than the ridiculous parodies in the style of King of Kings, and Cecil B DeMille. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jun 15, 2022

It's a powerful if flawed film, made not to blaspheme but to explore. It's a Christian film in the best sense of that word.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 6, 2022

It's a challenging film in the best sense, a gritty, deeply felt effort to renew the significance of Christ in terms of contemporary experience, and one that reminds us of how radical Christ was.

| May 6, 2022

All of the uninformed protest will only serve to fuel attendance for what turns out to be a very fine, thoughtful and beautifully performed rumination on Jesus and the difficulty of living according to His principles.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 6, 2022

An admirably serious, accomplished movie, though it betrays little of the complicated texture and furious creativity of Scorsese at his best.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 6, 2022

Few tasks could be more delicate or demanding than to reconceive the story of Jesus Christ... The sheer audacity of taking on this project in 1988 makes The Last Temptation of Christ exemplary.

| May 6, 2022

At its best and most moving, Scorsese's film leaps across two millennia and creates an extraordinary sense of what Christ's time was like.

| May 6, 2022

At the bottom of the controversy is an intense, utterly sincere, frequently fascinating piece of art by a director for whom, clearly, the message of Jesus' life has immediacy and meaning.

| May 6, 2022

I was profoundly moved by The Last Temptation of Christ, struck by its passion. The film works as parable, and it works as drama. It's brawny and daring and beautiful, full of an eerie grace.

| Original Score: 4/4 | May 6, 2022

A film of challenging ideas, and not salacious provocations, The Last Temptation of Christ is a powerful and very modern reinterpretation of Jesus as a man wracked with anguish and doubt concerning his appointed role in life.

| May 6, 2022

Though the choices that shape this exceptionally ambitious, deeply troubling and, at infrequent moments, genuinely transcendent film are often contradictory, they create an extra dimension.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 6, 2022

A water-into-wine miracle on screen. Visually breathtaking and intellectually scorching, the movie represents an extraordinary feat of film-making. But what it attempts is so ambitious that, in the end, it is a gloriously imperfect masterpiece.

| May 6, 2022

It may be Scorsese’s most courageous film, and it is technically superb, but it is at times heavy going.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 6, 2022

Scorsese has always listened to his own music. And here he's conducted his search for Jesus in his own way. He's done it with integrity, reverence and a good deal of cinematic beauty.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 6, 2022

If this be heresy, Scorsese hasn't made the most of it.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 6, 2022