William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice Reviews
Top CriticPacino is at least dynamic, something harder to say about the women in the cast.
This is Al Pacino's show, and thankfully his Shylock is absorbing enough to carry the day.
Radford has rendered off the comedy to find the dramatic skeleton underneath. It is an approach that works stunningly well and is perhaps the only way the play can now be done.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
A vivid, engrossing and defensible Shakespeare adaptation, a period piece that truly has a feel for a time long past -- and a place and attitude that are not.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Pacino's stentorian delivery and punctuating hands are almost parodistic, as likely to draw a chuckle as to elicit empathy.
| Original Score: C+
Radford remains fairly reverent toward the text and the intent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Ranks as one of the most powerful recent adaptations of the bard's work.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Radford makes the most of Venice's dark, entangling corners, and Merchant certainly has its better moments, even if its melange of acting styles and directorial intentions don't quite build into a totally successful production.
| Original Score: B
The give-and-take between the two veterans [Pacino and Irons] is a delight to witness.
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| Original Score: 3/4
For lovers of the play's language ... the losses will hurt. But as cinematic storytelling, it works.
[Al Pacino's] terrific to watch and listen to; you can't take your eyes off him.
The Merchant of Venice is a problematic play, but Michael Radford's new movie version passes most of the cinematic Shakespeare tests with flying colors.
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| Original Score: B+
In what is, unbelievably, the first English-language film of Merchant since the silent era, Collins and Pacino plumb the depths of acting, of Shakespeare, of the difference between law and justice.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Beauty and ugliness mingle in this play, with the beauty of language ultimately triumphing.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Were it not for the stain of anti-Semitism that forever marks Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, there is little doubt that Michael Radford's brave screen adaptation would currently be in serious contention for awards.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A lean, stripped-down and unapologetically cinematic take on Shakespeare's work, an adaptation designed at each turn to diminish the mechanics of the comedy and to explore the depths of the pathos.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Shylock is an intense, passionate character in a great play, and Radford's film does them justice.
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| Original Score: 3/4
An important, timeless and sometimes troublesome classic has been filmed successfully and at long last.
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| Original Score: 3/4
To quote the touching words of one correspondent, posted during an online discussion of this movie, 'I didn't like the story.' Not much to be done about that.
An exceptional example of Shakespeare on film, one that will leave audiences moved but also unsettled, in that strange way characteristic of Shakespeare's comedies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Pacino takes Shylock, perhaps the most insistent and troubling character in all of Shakespeare, and roots him powerfully to the ground.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Radford doesn't solve the problems of The Merchant of Venice, which nowadays is too disturbing to be played for comedy and too unresolved to qualify as tragedy or even that ever-shifting hybrid, tragicomedy.
The film itself occasionally plods, but Pacino, tackling a tough trap of a role, raises the bar in a mesmerizing acting triumph.
| Original Score: 3/4
Despite some clunky exposition and rote iambic line readings, it attains a bona fide Shakespearean vibrance.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Worth seeing for its lovely Venetian settings and evocative score but most of all for Pacino's spectacular rendering of Shylock.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Shylock, Portia, money-lending and betrayal get a little too much help from director Michael Radford.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Shakespeare's most problematic play at least with respect to modern sensitivities receives an intelligent interpretation from Michael Radford and a superb cast.
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| Original Score: 3/5
An uneasy blend of tragedy, comedy and anti-Semitism.
| Original Score: 2/4
A queasy comedy in which Pacino burns a hole in the screen while the frivolity around him sputters.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Even notwithstanding this version's inert blocking and awkward camera placements, The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's more crooked and hollow contraptions in any guise.
This is one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare I've ever seen. Pacino's amazing.
Pacino gives a keenly measured performance, leading an excellent British cast through their paces in a richly colorful production.
