77
Metascore
20 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- For a movie with such a brisk pace -- it clocks in at just 76 minutes -- Caesar Must Die has surprising depth, particularly when it comes to the strong performances by the actors, many of them Mafiosi serving time for drug trafficking and murder.
- 83The A.V. ClubNoel MurrayThe A.V. ClubNoel MurrayIn Caesar Must Die, the characters are both actor and audience, looking at themselves through the lens of a centuries-old fictionalization of history.
- 80NPRBob MondelloNPRBob MondelloThe Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, have been blurring the line between reality and fiction in their films for six decades.
- 80The New YorkerAnthony LaneThe New YorkerAnthony LaneThe result feels, like Shakespeare's play, at once ancient and dangerously new.
- 80New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinNew York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinIn a scant hour and a quarter it enlarges your notion of what theater and cinema, what art itself, can do — it dissolves every boundary it meets.
- 75Slant MagazineSlant MagazineDeceptively modest on nearly all accounts, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die employs seemingly minor directorial contrivances to ruminate on a unique quarrel.
- 70Village VoiceNick PinkertonVillage VoiceNick PinkertonAlmost as much as the play itself, the rehearsals are staged; the inmates learning to act, then, are acting like inmates who are learning to act. This leads to some on-the-nose scenes in which they observe the parallels between the text and their own lives.
- 70The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyThe Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyThis is a looser, grittier film than their work of late, and while it’s more successful in the sequences of bold theatricality than in the faux-cinéma vérité of the surrounding scenes, the mix is nonetheless an interesting one.
- 70The New York TimesManohla DargisThe New York TimesManohla DargisThere’s an elemental, almost primitive quality to the Tavianis’ condensing that, at its most effective, dovetails with the prison’s severely circumscribed material reality, as if the high walls, barred windows and suffocating rooms were manifestations of the characters’ states of mind.
- 40Time OutKeith UhlichTime OutKeith UhlichThough the Tavianis’ intent is clear—to comment on the thin line separating part and performer, as well as on the quite literally liberating powers of art—the meanings rarely emerge with any elegance or resonance. Hardly a dish fit for the gods.