"A picture in which all of experience seems shot through with the sweetness of the dearly departed, the already mourned."

| Oct 23, 2024

Claudia Cardinale's entrance into the film immediately notes a change in The Leopard's atmosphere of desire.

| Jun 5, 2024

It gives you an extraordinary sense of the texture of a grand family's life in Sicily during the Risorgirnemo. Visconti accumulates details like a Russian novelist.

| Mar 6, 2024

Here is a work of a type we rarely see anymore -- a sweeping popular epic, with obvious similarities to Gone with the Wind.

| Sep 11, 2023

Visconti's epic is a work of astonishing proportions. The breadth and depth of his treatment of the subject matter is on a scale almost unimaginable in recent cinema.

| Mar 1, 2021

To transpose a book into a movie means to destroy the form of the original in order to re-create the effect in another medium... Visconti has preserved the form without apparently suspecting it had any meaning.

| Aug 13, 2019

Lancaster's portrayal is fantastic throughout. The man bleeds gravitas from his bewhiskered face to his shiny shoes... Even though the sets are some of the most spectacular and lavish ever committed to celluloid, he manges to usurp them.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 5, 2018

[Burt Lancaster's] confidence, his gravitas, and his understated cat-like grace as he walks through the world as if he owned it, creates a character of great authority and even greater melancholy.

| Jan 5, 2018

The film aches with regret over a crumbling empire, but its feelings are complicated by the wise prince, who recognizes his place on the wrong side of history.

| Dec 11, 2013

[VIDEO ESSAY] Lancaster's every movement and facial expression transmits the text and subtext of his Italian character with a sense of regional authenticity that is beguiling.

| Original Score: A+ | Dec 10, 2013

A fine drama that Tolstoy would endorse, remarkable for relying not on conflict between the uncle and the nephew but rather on their thorough devotion to each other.

| Original Score: 81/100 | Jun 13, 2013

A magnificent film, munificently outfitted and splendidly acted by a large cast dominated by Burt Lancaster's standout stint in the title role.

| Feb 23, 2012

The film is a long, rich sigh at the end of the day, one that only Don Fabrizio can hear.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 24, 2011

Artistically drawn as if from an old master's hand.

| Original Score: A+ | Feb 22, 2011

Watching The Leopard is like taking an indulgent bubble bath - albeit one in which the fragrance from the soap is overwhelming.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 4, 2011

The Leopard is more than a tad too pleased by its own spots, but in this case the source material and its director's intentions were almost accidentally an appropriate match.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 30, 2010

Two-plus hours of engrossing machinations and opulent scenery point the way to the pièce de résistance: a 45-minute gala scene that the Almighty himself would approve as a luxuriant prelude to the Rapture.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 22, 2010

The film is one of the most sumptuous ever made in Europe.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 1, 2010

Visconti (a Marxist aristocrat) offers an elegiac meditation on the passing of a society whose feudalism he deplores but whose elegance he mourns.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 1, 2010

A feast of a film that is well worth seeing on a cinema screen.

| Aug 30, 2010