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Critics Consensus: A classic story adapted by a filmmaker near his creative peak, Chimes at Midnight unites Welles and Shakespeare - and powerfully distills the best of both.
Critic Consensus: A classic story adapted by a filmmaker near his creative peak, Chimes at Midnight unites Welles and Shakespeare - and powerfully distills the best of both.
All Critics (42) | Top Critics (16) | Fresh (41) | Rotten (1) | DVD (1)
Welles' vision and imagination is unmatched in film. His use of light in a forbidding, dark castle is a wonder.
Thanks to an astonishingly crisp restoration, Orson Welles' 1965 Shakespearean masterpiece can now be appreciated by anyone who thought his best days behind the camera ended with Touch of Evil.
Quite likely the greatest Shakespearean film ever.
See it on the big screen if you can; for all of its flaws it's a glory.
The best and most touchingly personal of all Shakespeare adaptations, Chimes At Midnight is pervaded by melancholy and loneliness, even though its characters are almost seen never alone.
Sprawling, and hugely ambitious, and containing a glorious Wellesian Falstaff who's as majestic in folly as he is in girth.
The film is wonderful and exasperating, the work of a genius, the reflections of an egotist, delicious utterances of great language and muddied speeches in other instances.
one of Welles's greatest late-stage accomplishments-a very nearly magnificent amalgam of plot points, characters, and dialogue from not just one or two of the Bard's history plays, but five of them
It feels much more like an experimental film than it does a typical Shakespeare adaptations.
Chimes at Midnight reflects the director's proclivity for out-of-step dreamers who prefer their lovely, useless fancies to cold, pragmatic practicalities.
The bones are impressively strong and simple.
Chimes at Midnight, whose very title resounds with awareness of mortality, is stylistically a bleak and cold vision, with steam often visible on the actors' breath in the frigid air.
Welles is obviously a great Falstaff but not in the ways you'd expect. His bold performance consistently defies conventional takes on the character.
Super Reviewer
Perhaps I was not in the mood to take in one of Shakespeare's lesser regarded works but I completely did not enjoy this Welles' masterpiece.
Considering that just about everything Orson Welles directed after "Citizen Kane" was compromised by studio interference and/or budgetary constraints, it's remarkable that he made as many brilliant movies as he did. "Chimes at Midnight" is one of his very best. Magnificent yet flawed, so well does this film mirror both its creator and the character he plays in it, lovable rogue Sir John Falstaff, that its very flaws almost become virtues. Though it is directed, photographed and edited with extraordinary skill, "Chimes at Midnight" contains some of the worst dialogue synching I have ever come across. A restoration of the film has long been rumoured, but such is the quantity of slapdash dubbing, short of creating a brand new soundtrack, no amount of judicious tweaking is ever likely to completely reunite Shakespeare's words with the lips that are uttering them. In spite of this, in spite of the difficult language and the dizzying editing style, which exhilarated but ultimately exhausted me, "Chimes at Midnight" is a wonderful movie.
magnificent. the finest shakespeare adaptation i've seen with one of the finest battle scenes ever filmed! absolutely breathtaking. it's criminal that this doesn't have a criterion and armageddon does
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