Caesar Must Die Reviews
Top CriticA film somewhere between documentary and neo-realist drama.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
There's barely a wasted moment in the film, which runs a brisk 76 minutes and contains no female roles.
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| Original Score: 3/4
There's an intensity and emotional accuracy to the performances that's just stunning, particularly Striano's Brutus, as he longs for death and release.
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| Original Score: A-
Prison theatricals are nothing new in the movies, but Caesar Must Die, a quasi-documentary featuring hardened convicts acting out Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, is in a class by itself.
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| Original Score: A-
Ranks among the most involving adaptations of Shakespeare ever put on screen ...
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| Original Score: 4/5
What works best is what's readily accessible, the startling power of performers who understand the drama all too well.
The film gets on screen not only the play's bloody, double-dealing, hungry essence, but the redemptive potential of art.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The Tavianis blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, but they couldn't do it without the full complicity of their actors, or the audience.
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| Original Score: 4/5
You can only guess what the lines mean to the inmates, who register as atmospheric blanks at best and brutal exotics at worst, even if the tale that they enact with such earnest vigor works because the original tragedy does.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
So solid is that conception, and so resonant the text in which questions of freedom and slavery are paramount, that the impact can hardly be diminished.
A gimmick film that begins to feel like a whole, natural piece.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Moving away from the literary costume dramas that have been their principal terrain for many years, the Taviani Brothers explore a fascinating encounter between theater and reality.
In a scant hour and a quarter it enlarges your notion of what theater and cinema, what art itself, can do -- it dissolves every boundary it meets.
The Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, have been blurring the line between reality and fiction in their films for six decades.
The movie's predominant black-and-white palette pares the action to its starkest outlines, and a few color sequences reconnect the prison, and the prisoners, to the surrounding world.
