...it looks amazing, it is probably blasphemous, it’s in keeping with the movie’s overall fantasy of Savage Russia...

| Aug 15, 2023

How best to describe The Scarlet Empress? Delirious? Demented? Diabolical? This historical epic is perhaps the best of the Dietrich-von Sternberg collaborations, so naturally it was a commercial disaster.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 16, 2021

This glamorous, sadistic fabrication appears one long procession of derivative ideas.

| Feb 3, 2021

Josef von Sternberg makes the cruelty the point in his lurid and macabre spectacle about the rise to absolute power of Catherine the Great, of Russia, who's played with an arachnid subtlety by Marlene Dietrich.

| Nov 21, 2020

Although Dietrich, as always, reigns supreme, this is von Sternberg's most sumptuous offering, a dashing and daring spectacle which allows its star to be but one of its various visual delights.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 18, 2020

Dietrich's sweetly accented delivery makes the most of both good and bad lines.

| Mar 17, 2020

The Scarlet Empress (1934) is director Josef von Sternberg's startling, dark, visually opulent, hauntingly expressionistic, semi-erotic and mostly fictional biopic of one of 18th century Russia's most illustrious historical figures -

| Original Score: A+ | Dec 19, 2019

...a costume-drama farce full of overly heated performances set against a macabre, nightmarish production design.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 23, 2019

Cossacks gallop furiously through this picture and Miss Marlene Dietrich is photographed in as many ways and from almost as many angles as a Warner Brothers chorus ensemble. Not much story and less history.

| Jul 23, 2019

They don't get much better than this.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 20, 2014

Josef von Sternberg's 1934 film turns the legend of Catherine the Great into a study of sexuality sadistically repressed and reborn as politics, thus anticipating Bertolucci by three decades.

| Aug 20, 2014

Not the most successful of Dietrich and von Sternburg's collaborations but interesting nonetheless.

| Aug 20, 2014

A tedious hyperbole in which Director Josef von Sternberg achieved the improbable feat of burying Marlene Dietrich in a welter of plaster-of-paris gargoyles and galloping cossacks.

| Aug 20, 2014

Overstuffed with indulgent, idiosyncratic performances using every accent from Budapest to Brooklyn, the film is like a flower so strange and so beautiful it could only have germinated in the hothouse environment of a major Hollywood studio.

| Aug 24, 2010

Josef von Sternberg becomes so enamoured of the pomp and flash values that he subjugates everything else to them. That he succeeds as well as he does is a tribute to his artistic genius and his amazingly vital sense of photogenic values.

| Mar 26, 2009

Running a solid hundred minutes, the film first shocks and stimulates the imagination, and then, lacking the dramatic skill to refresh its audiences, becomes steadily duller.

| Aug 8, 2006

Von Sternberg's most realized film that combines a brilliant spectacle of royal pomp and mise-en-scene with Harpo Marx-like silent comedy.

| Original Score: A+ | Feb 14, 2006

The decor and costumes, and the mise-en-scéne that deploys them, have never been equaled for expressionist intensity.

| Feb 9, 2006

The film tells the story of Catherine the Great as a bizarre visual extravaganza, combining twisted sexuality and bold bawdy humor as if Mel Brooks had collaborated with the Marquis de Sade.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 20, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 21, 2005