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75It has greatness in moments, and is denied greatness overall only because it is such a peculiar construction; watching it is like channel-surfing between a teen romance and a dark abysm of loss and grief.
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63Intriguing but ultimately unfulfilling.
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83Pacino shows you what is only subliminally in the text: that Shylock's heart of stone is really a wall of wounded pride.
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50Not even a compelling performance by Al Pacino as Shylock can make The Merchant of Venice work in its first major big-screen adaptation.
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75The film itself occasionally plods, but Pacino, tackling a tough trap of a role, raises the bar in a mesmerizing acting triumph.
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100An exceptional example of Shakespeare on film.
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50In this exquisitely filmed adaptation Pacino is as vivid a Shylock as we're likely to see. Despite all the scholarly excuses for this drama, though, it's shot through with outrageously anti-Semitic attitudes.
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50Uncomfortable as the film is, it's a beautiful, sensuous experience.
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75The reason to see The Merchant of Venice is Al Pacino.
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80To watch this movie is to not only appreciate the majesty of Shakespeare's poetics but to engage in a profound, subtextual dialogue with bigotry.
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75Given the story's focus on religion and the intolerance that still rages in today's world, The Merchant of Venice remains deeply meaningful.
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70Overall this is an intelligent and thoughtful reading of the play, marred only by the implausibility of Portia.
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80What Radford above all accomplishes in his filming of The Merchant of Venice is to suggest that, in essence, it is that most modern of entertainments: a dark - indeed, very dark - comedy.
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50William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice may help in bringing some of the Bard's language to life, but this rendition is hardly a freshman course.
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58Even though it largely succeeds in putting a civil face on some unpalatable material, it lacks the heat and suppleness of the best Shakespeare on film.
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100A 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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88Collins and Pacino plumb the depths of acting, of Shakespeare, of the difference between law and justice.
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75Pacino has done more Shakespeare than any other currently bankable movie star, he has a feel for the language and he lends a genuine grandeur to Shylock's big speech of self-defense.
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50It makes for quite a rumpus, but the material never catches fire.
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50Taking one's pound of flesh and having it, too, leads to a queasy comedy in which Pacino burns a hole in the screen while the frivolity around him sputters.
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50When the halves of the film collide in the courtroom climax, it looks like a misbegotten pilot for Law & Order: Usury Victims Unit.
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80Pacino seems to recall, from his early Michael Corleone days, the power of whispered menace.
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70Btter-than-average screen Shakespeare: intelligent without being showily clever, and motivated more by genuine fascination with the play's language and ideas than by a desire to cannibalize its author's cultural prestige.
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80This Merchant of Venice comes roaring to life--when it stops, in effect, apologizing for its terrible anti-Semitic worldview and just gives itself over to some of the most furious courtroom drama ever written.
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50Shakespeare's rich language does not fit soundly inside every mouth.
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50There are too many rancors--hatred of life, hatred of others, hatred of their means to happiness--to contend with here, and the loveliness of the verse beats fruitlessly against them, as if against a wharf.
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70What Radford has retained of the original, he treats warmly and intelligently, and with a few welcome surprises in the acting. But he has produced a different work, moderately successful in itself, out of materials provided by Shakespeare.
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30It all collapses under an atrocious performance by Pacino, whose laughably bad accent and scene-chewing delivery serve up thick slabs of that rarest of delicacies: Jewish ham. There may be grounds here for a class-action lawsuit.
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50Pacino simply wipes the cobblestones with the rest of the cast: His beautifully calibrated performance is lucid, commanding, and genuinely tragic.
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70Despite a series of disclaimers about the treatment of Jews in the 16th century, there's even less disguising onscreen than onstage that this is an uncomfortably anti-Semitic play and somewhat problematic for contempo audiences.
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10The single worst Shakespeare film ever made.
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Pacino gives a keenly measured performance, leading an excellent British cast through their paces in a richly colorful production that should please selective audiences and adds to the list of major film adaptations of Shakespeare's work.
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An important, timeless and sometimes troublesome classic has been filmed successfully and at long last.
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Radford has made a gripping, highly cinematic adaptation of a gorgeous work of theater.
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As cinematic storytelling, it works.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 17
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Mixed: 2 out of 17
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Negative: 3 out of 17
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10
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RichardB.9