Coriolanus Reviews
Top CriticThe other actors do their best to help Fiennes define this curious anti-hero. Incapable of playing the role of peacetime compromiser, his Coriolanus comes across as a warrior who simply can't function without a war.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The film has fifth-act problems, as did the play, but Fiennes' bleak overview should leave receptive viewers feeling daunted and haunted.
The play's inherent difficulties notwithstanding, Coriolanus, the movie, is a perfectly sound achievement.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Fiennes leads a cast that, at least in the major roles, is uniformly powerful.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Slathered in blood, covered with scars and glowering with a predator's gaze, Ralph Fiennes makes a fierce and impressive Caius Martius Coriolanus.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's all very unnerving, modern and yet veins-in-the-teeth visceral.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
As a portrait of modern warfare, politics and propaganda, "Coriolanus" is intriguing, even if the gritty action sequences don't quite measure up to the realism of "The Hurt Locker."
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Ralph Fiennes turns one of Shakespeare's least-loved plays into a slashing, muscular but uneven modern drama in his film-directing debut.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Even in what is viewed as a minor work, the inevitable currents of ambition and violence, cruelty and competition, rivalry and rage run strong and truthfully.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
When Caius Martius heads into battle against the invading Volscians, we get 20-odd minutes of brutal street-fighting with RPGs and crackling automatic weapons. The film was shot in Serbia; dial a few decades back and it could have been set there.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
In his first film as a director, Fiennes proves that he knows Fiennes the actor inside out, with a self-knowledge that's rare, even admirable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
You buy the concept, from start to finish, because it feels strong and purposeful and in sync with Shakespeare's own vision of a malleable, fickle populace and a leader raised by the ultimate stage mother.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Visually and dramatically it works well-it's Shakespeare by way of Black Hawk Down-but as an allegory of modern-day geopolitics it doesn't really go anywhere.
I admired the movie even though I found it neither fish nor fowl.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
What remains, in distilled form, is the poetry of violence and contempt-the source of the play's unfailing reputation for political threat and mischief.
The questions Coriolanus poses are so timeless and urgent they could be pullquotes from today's op-ed page.
It's a film of vigorous performances and provocative modern resonances, though it sometimes struggles to grapple with a grim, politically ambiguous, 400-year-old play.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Riches of character are revealed, with copious visual invention.
Purists may holler that Fiennes and screenwriter John Logan have cut the Bard's second-longest play into two tense hours onscreen, but the power of the piece is undeniable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A committed and worthwhile celluloid version of a play so few of us really know.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Fiennes directs theater on the grand scale, burning his characters down to expose the terrible beauty of the human soul.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
For Shakespeare neophytes whose primary familiarity with the Bard has been through the cinema, watching Coriolanus may seem like unearthing a lost treasure.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Finds something to say about the cult of personality, the trickery of political campaigns, and the potential dangers of populist movements.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
In attempting to update the play to a buzzing CNN world, Ralph Fiennes proves that as a director, he makes a fine actor.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Ralph Fiennes makes Shakespeare modern and bloody brilliant.
Fiennes' crackerjack "Coriolanus" stays true to the clever, almost mean-spirited twists and turns of the story, and preserves the authentic flavor and texture of the language.
Fiennes brings to scorching life on-screen, spitting out his rage with such force the words seem likely to damage literally as well as figuratively.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Fiennes brings an of-the-moment energy to one of Shakespeare's later tragedies. Yet with its forever-war landscape, it couldn't be more relevant.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The language lives, as do the people, who are present enough that it's almost a surprise no one brandishes that timely protest sign, "Occupy Rome."
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
It feels perfectly natural for iambic pentameter to be coming out of the mouths of cable-news pundits.
Fiennes takes one of the playwright's lesser-known works, originally set in the 5th century B.C., updates it to current times and imbues it with a gritty blood-spattered fierceness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The play has been significantly but artfully trimmed by John Logan's screenplay, which preserves Shakespeare's language.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A spiky and complex counterweight to Hollywood sentiment and indie cynicism alike.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
The transposition to present day is confusing and counterproductive, dulling the impact of an otherwise fierce, often unbearably immediate production.
Fiennes and Logan haven't made a definitive Coriolanus, but they've made a sensationally gripping one. They have the pulse of the play, its firm martial beats and its messy political clatter. They tell a damn good story.
There is a narrative arc to Coriolanus, but it moves along at a snail's pace and the main theme of the film (the pride of Gaius vs. the people he's sworn to protect) isn't a grabber.
Full Review
| Original Score: D+
As directing debuts go, Coriolanus could easily pass for the work of an accomplished master, and though the storytelling lends itself to easy confusion (owing more to the source material than to the execution), the emotional impact reads loud and clear.
