Just as he did with 2018's At Eternity's Gate, in which he embodied the artist Vincent van Gogh, [Willem] Dafoe brilliantly captures the essence and a more-than-reasonable resemblance to the real figures.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 8, 2019

It may be only one man's version of what many have speculated about... but in its clear-eyed grittiness, it's also a tribute from a filmmaker for whom the night's temptations were ripe and its dangers legion.

| May 30, 2019

Ferrara... straining toward the sublime, stumbles into vulgarity.

| May 13, 2019

Reluctantly takes its place in a cinema of admonition that turns human lives lived against oppressive opposition into simplistic warnings against having sex on the beach. The man deserves better.

| May 10, 2019

Ferrara's Pasolini is sincere, even scholarly; as a film, it feels too stilted and reverent to capture much of that sense of danger.

| May 10, 2019

One of the most intuitive and mysterious movie biographies made in a while.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 10, 2019

Part hero worship, part true-crime tragedy and completely of a piece with its creator's obsessions over the spiritual and the sordid.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 10, 2019

As exquisitely detailed and historically accurate as many of its scenes are, "Pasolini" is less concerned with the realistic reconstruction of the past than with communicating a mood in the present.

| May 9, 2019

If the blend of English and Italian dialogue seems slightly awkward, it doesn't disrupt the film's ease: a matter-of-factness which resists idolizing Pasolini in favor of an open-minded rendering of everyday humanity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 3, 2019

Pasolini may not be the film we were promised, but it turns out to be something better: a thought-provoking - if not quite masterful - cinematic portrait of an artist whose visionary oeuvre remains poorly understood.

| Sep 21, 2017

The heady cocktail of politics, religion, blowjobs and murder is catnip for Ferrara, although anyone not versed in the controversies of Salò may leave the film none the wiser.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 13, 2015

Despite Ferrara's insistence that he and his key crew are devout students of Pasolini's cinema, he applies the lessons of this apprenticeship freely, without mimicry.

| Sep 11, 2015

The film isn't so much a conventional narrative as an elegy and a parable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 11, 2015

The decision to base so much of the film on existing text - the interviews, the manuscript, the screenplay - lends a deadening dryness to much of Pasolini.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 11, 2015

Abel Ferrara tries (and fails) to solve the riddle of who killed the famed Italian director.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 11, 2015

You come in expecting portraiture, but Ferrara gives you Cubist still life.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 10, 2015

Ferrara creates a palimpsest of ideas, though I found those imaginary recreations of finite dramatic interest.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 10, 2015

Working in the most white elephantine of genres, Ferrara has produced one of its few termitic entries.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 19, 2014

In trying to spell out what was going on his Pasolini's mind, he does his idol's talents a disservice. Ferrara tells us so much more about Pasolini -the filmmaker, the artist, the public figure- when he leaves it to us to imagine what the man thought.

| Original Score: B- | Sep 11, 2014

A flawed film of unvarnished integrity.

| Original Score: B | Sep 11, 2014