Passion of the Christ, The

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion. Take it or leave it.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

Gibson has made a big, bold, nightmarishly beautiful film not just about the dawn of the Christian faith, but about the awful tendency of human communities (wherever and whenever in the world they may exist) toward self-preservation, intolerance and mob rule.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

A gripping, powerful motion picture -- arguably the most forceful depiction of Jesus' death ever to be committed to film. It leaves an indelible imprint on the psyche; viewers of this movie may never look at a crucifix in quite the same way.

Variety Todd McCarthy

If an age produces the renditions of classic stories that reflect those times, then The Passion of the Christ, which is violent, contentious, emotional, extreme and highly proficient, must be the Jesus movie for this era.

Time Richard Corliss

A serious, handsome, excruciating film that radiates total commitment.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Powerfully moving and fanatically obtuse in equal doses. The typical star rating doesn't apply, because scenes range from classic to poor and all stops in between.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A highly personal, provocative and in some ways riveting vision with an inspired performance by Jim Caviezel as Jesus.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It's a strange kind of spiritual movie -- one that aims for the gut more often than the heart.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Tempting as it may be to dismiss Mel Gibson as a glorified pain freak, dressing up a martyrdom fantasy in Aramaic and Latin, it would be more accurate, I think, to say that the filmmaker, a Catholic fundamentalist, presents his torture-racked vision of Jesus' last 12 hours on earth as a sacred form of shock therapy.

USA Today Claudia Puig

There is enlightenment -- even stark poetry -- in The Passion.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Stunning in its violence and fascinating in its ironbound focus.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

It's not the most flattering depiction of Jews I've seen. Still, The Passion of the Christ is something of a masterpiece, terrible to behold, unfit for children, certainly, but very much the work of a director in the throes of his own distinct passion.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The main message of this drama is driven home with emotional hammer blows.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

More spirit and grace and less blood and guts may be what Passion needs.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Seems to be exactly the movie Mel Gibson wanted to make as an abiding profession of his traditionalist Catholic faith. On that score it is a success.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Even within what often looks like a self-indulgent exercise in humiliation, pain and gratuitous gore, there is no denying the moments of genuine and powerful feeling in The Passion of the Christ -- some of which, by the way, evoke Jesus's most profound teachings of Jewish principles.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The film is never dull -- no mean feat, given that it spends two hours telling a story whose end is widely known -- and features performances that range from coarsely effective to phenomenal.

Empire Ian Nathan

A tormented movie about torment; loopy, over-reaching and occasionally suspicious. Simultaneously, it is a daring artistic endeavour.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

Controversial, yet undeniably powerful.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Mel Gibson may have changed the face of cinema forever. I think he has: He's made the first true Jesusploitation flick, a picture that, despite its self-righteous air of grave religiosity, is barely spiritual at all.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday. Emphasizing Jesus' agony over His ecstasy, Gibson has delivered a blood-drenched epic more stunning for its brutal violence than for its depiction of the calvary.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The Passion of the Christ should have left audiences in a state of exaltation. Instead it just leaves audiences exhausted.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

Gibson's intense concentration on the scourging and whipping of the physical body virtually denies any metaphysical significance to the most famous half-day in history.

Newsweek David Ansen

Instead of being moved by Christ's suffering, or awed by his sacrifice, I felt abused by a filmmaker intent on punishing an audience, for who knows what sins.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

In effect, aspects of Gibson's creative makeup -- his career-long interest in martyrdom and the yearning for dramatic conflict that make him an excellent actor, coupled with his belief in the Gospels' literal truth -- have sideswiped this film. What is left is a film so narrowly focused as to be inaccessible for all but the devout.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Expertly made, thanks largely to Jim Caviezel's fervent portrayal of Jesus and Caleb Deschanel's skillful camera work. But the film contains little to learn from, unless one is unfamiliar with basic Christian history.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Did it move me? And the answer is no. I thought it has a certain ghoulish, voyeuristic fascination, but I found it strangely remote and uninvolving on both emotional and spiritual levels.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

On its own, apart from whatever beliefs a viewer might bring to it, The Passion of the Christ never provides a clear sense of what all of this bloodshed was for, an inconclusiveness that is Mr. Gibson's most serious artistic failure.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

X-ploitative though it may be, the spectacle of a man beaten and tortured to death seeks to be an object of contemplation. Serious questions are raised.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

It's too turgid to awe the nonbelievers, too zealous to inspire and often too silly to take seriously, with its demonic hallucinations that look like escapees from a David Lynch film; I swear I couldn't find the devil carrying around a hairy-backed midget anywhere in the text I read.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

It isn't just the violence that is overplayed. There is so much creepy-Gothic Sturm und Drang in The Passion that at times it seems as if Clive Barker should get credit for the story along with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Film Threat Jay Bliznick

Who is this film for? It’s for the Christian followers who haven’t really read their scripture.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

What I do know is that I was gripped for a while by the strength of Mr. Gibson's filmmaking, only to be repelled and eventually excluded by his literalist insistence on excruciation. There is watching in horror, and there is watching in horror.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

The $25 million of his own that Gibson is said to have put into this film may be conscience money, and the savagery in the picture may--consciously or not--be Gibson's way of saying that violence is not always valueless.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Gibson mounts a convincing crucifixion, but his victim is the audience. The Passion of the Christ aims its metallic cat-o'-nine-tails at the viewers' nerves.

The New Yorker David Denby

By embracing the Roman pageant so openly, using all the emotional resources of cinema, Gibson has cancelled out the redemptive and transfiguring power of art. [1 March 2004, p. 84]

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

While it fails to shed significant new light on its subject, Gibson's film and the all-Jesus-all-the-time attention from the media it's attracted do tell us something somewhat disconcerting about the state of American culture: That the way to make a religion based on love and forgiveness relevant today is to turn it into violent entertainment.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II. It is sickening.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

The visual big top is the scourging and the crucifixion -- again and again, Gibson returns to the blood-letting. Again and again, we're exposed to the clinical repetition of a single act, until an alleged act of passion comes to seem boring and passionless. Is that not a definition of pornography?

Premiere Glenn Kenny

From my perspective, the film's anti-Semitism is implicit rather than programmatic, and, in the film's current form, a little sneaky.

Slate David Edelstein

This is a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie -- The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre -- that thinks it's an act of faith.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Gibson makes sure that no blow remains unfelt, and his approach can't help but stir the body, but he never touches the soul.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

If I were a Christian, I'd be appalled to have this primitive and pornographic bloodbath presume to speak for me.