Gladiator Reviews
Total Film
This is visceral film-making at its finest, painted on the grandest of canvases, and yet, one which maintains the finest eye for detail.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Top CriticThe fusion of the ancient and the modern -- even to the point of some sly echoes of our own sports-mad society -- is seamless. Gladiator does indeed deliver the glory that was Rome, but it also clinically dissects the assumptions on which it was built.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
AV Club
In the end, Gladiator is overdrawn and too insubstantial for its own good, just like the old days, but it satisfies as entertainment on a grand scale.
Gladiator's combination of grim sanctimony and drenching, Dolby-ized dismemberings left me appalled.
Time for a little gladiatorial gore with your Milk Duds. Gladiator is here, and it's big, glorious and eminently dumb
Christian Science Monitor
While Crowe's acting is certainly more subtle than most of the brouhaha around him, he has little chance to display the affecting humanity that's one of his chief assets.
Common Sense Media
Really excellent but really violent Oscar winner.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Suite101.com
Russell Crowe is as believable a Spaniard here as Charlton Heston was a Mexican in "Touch of Evil." But director Ridley Scott took greater interest in entwining an empire's intrigue with its people's turmoil than emphasizing bread-and-circus brutality.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Movie Metropolis
...stirring action, good performances, and a plethora of visual delights.
Full Review
| Original Score: 7/10
LarsenOnFilm
The brutality has such a mythical grandeur that it occasionally resembles beauty.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Bangor Daily News (Maine)
Beefcake! Blood! Body slams! Boring! Boring? Well, not quite, but at 150 minutes, "Gladiator" isn't entirely the thrilling, action-packed Roman epic some fans of the genre were expecting.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Sacramento News & Review
Scott triumphantly transports us back to the Roman Empire circa 180 A.D. with a painter's eye for detail, a proven talent for manufacturing exotic realities (such as the future shock of Blade Runner) and a sweet tooth for utter spectacle.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
eFilmCritic.com
If a gladiator film doesn't work as spectacle or as bloodthirsty action, what's left? Drama? It's dead on that level, too...
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Big Picture Big Sound
The film is good, at times grizzly, fun -- of epic proportions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Ultimately, Gladiator is an honorable and inoffensive spectacle with nothing extraordinary to recommend it.
Though the digital effects lack the weight and conviction of their equivalents in old Cecil B. De Mille movies, Ridley Scott's sword-and-sandal epic has some of the intensity of old Hollywood in terms of storytelling, spectacle, and violence.
Cinema Sight
A Roman version of Ben-Hur, Gladiator succeeds on only slightly more levels than it fails.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
EmanuelLevy.Com
Notwithsdanding the blood, gore, and CG effects, this is an old-fashioned historical saga, a throwabck to the sand-and-sandals epics of Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
