Cleopatra

Cleopatra is a piece of overcooked lunacy.

As the sets seem to grow bigger and bigger, so progressively the players dwindle.

Taylor inhabits the role with a focussed but uninhibited imperiousness, as when she turns Cleopatra's entrance into Rome, aboard a giant rolling sphinx, into the ultimate red-carpet photo op.

A stately but sometimes mindboggling spectacle.

Melodramatic, and camp as Christmas, but nothing like the disaster its reputation suggests.

It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience, for good and ill.

The events have no pressure behind them: instead of erupting out of the upheavals of three powerfully exciting and self-willed personalities, they seem to be happening because the extras and the sets are there.

The difficulty for the performer of getting out from under the scenery, the sets, the costumes and the colour and making an impression not as a member of the cast but as an actor (or actress) is severe.

I must report that this film is at best a major disappointment, at worst an extravagant exercise in tedium.

Far from the sumptuous sets that reproduce antiquity with a certain authenticity, 'Cleopatra' is an epic spectacle to which I find nothing but an erratic and artificious result in its four hours and eleven minutes of length. [Full Review in Spanish]