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

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

| Mar 17, 2020

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

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

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

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