Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . and it obviously was aimed at the impaired prostate crowd, with all of its entrance music (for last minute leaks), intermission scoring (for mid-stream relief), and exit tunes (for guys who just cannot wait another second). But CIRCUS WORLD star John Wayne chose his projects carefully (no, he's NOT the killer clown, as you might guess), and he was sharp enough to realize that if half the geezers with one foot in an old folks home Ponied up to see this flick, he'd be able to corner the market on Panamanian shrimp (which he did, in Real Life). If you told a bunch of screenwriters the plot of CIRCUS WORLD, they'd tell you that it would be a real stretch to pad out such thin material to as long as a 90-minute film. But "Il Duce" never had any truck with people who could communicate in complete sentences, so he stubbornly insists here upon chewing up a lot more than he bit off during a grueling 143 minutes. My party was laughing hysterically as Wayne's "Matt" character shinnies up to the peak of the Big Top to save "Lili" from an inferno. Because even if CIRCUS WORLD had been a million years longer, Matt would still be trying to get off the ground!

TheLittleSongbird Is The Magnificent Showman a good movie? Not really. Is it entertaining? In some ways, yes, but it also has a number of problems. As far as John Wayne go, The Magnificent Showman is not among the best like The Searchers, Fort Apache and The Quiet Man. But he has also done worse in his career as seen(in my opinion that is) with The Conqueror, Brannigan and The Green Berets. In fact, it probably belongs somewhere in the middle.I did very much like how The Magnificent Showman looked. The cinematography, effects, costumes and sets/scenery are amazingly effective. There are also some scenes that hold up well and entertain, particularly worth of note are the climatic fire and the capsizing of the circus ship, both scenes are full of excitement and tension.The Magnificent Showman was begun as Circus World, directed by Frank Capra. As much as I very much like Capra and his films, Henry Hathaway, who the film was later entrusted to, in my view was much more suitable for the job. And while there are some assets that don't work as well as they should, Hathaway does deserve credit for directing as solidly as he did.Aside from the cinematography, effects and set pieces, the other outstanding asset is Dmitri Tiomkin's score, which is energetic, beautiful, haunting and rousing as it should be. And while I wasn't that impressed really with the acting, two performances do stand out- Rita Hayworth and Claudia Cardinale. Hayworth is captivating and Cardinale is a sheer delight. Together they are even better, here they seem to be having a contest at who's the best at upstaging the other, and it is a lot of fun to watch. Just for the record, I think Cardinale just about wins the contest.These aside, I was divided personally on the performance of John Wayne. I do like Wayne a lot, but I wasn't sure about him here. What I did like was his charisma, Wayne was a very charismatic actor and that comes loud and clear here. However, for my liking his delivery of the lines seemed rather stiff and there were times where I couldn't help thinking he was too old for the role.The film is too long, at 133 minutes it is very lengthy. This wouldn't have mattered so much if the pace and story were good, sadly neither were as solid as I would have liked. There are a fair number of exciting scenes that do elevate the story, but the more talky and slower moments are rather sluggish. The story had a great concept to work from, but the final result seemed rather over-stuffed and cobbled together, also some plot points could have been better developed. But my main gripe was the dialogue, some of which was really quite bad being very clichéd and silly.All in all, entertaining enough but has a lot of flaws that stop it from being any more than that. 6/10 Bethany Cox

kosmasp It's not an in depth look behind the scenes of a circus. But you will get to see a few things that you might not have known. The core is the story of Wayne and his family. His two families so to speak. It's nicely told, even if some things seem to happen just like that, without much of a problem (or the problem being resolved too easily).There are quite a few stunts on hand here and they are decent enough. Though sometimes when John Waynes character is doing risky things, it is so obviously not John Wayne but his stunt man, that it almost hurts. That is of course something that should not be a big problem. Or do not let it be one, if you can.

callingbrian Some sources claim Samuel Bronston's "Circus World" was filmed in Cinerama. It wasn't. It was filmed in Ultra-Panavision 70 and released in some venues in the single lens "Ultra-Cinerama" format, which optically expanded the image to fill the huge Cinerama screen. Regardless, the cinematography is outstanding, which, along with a haunting Main Title theme by composer Dimitri Tiomkin, is perhaps the best thing that can be said about this unfortunate production. That is, unless you consider the fact it contributed to the collapse of producer Samuel Bronston's short-lived film empire to be a good thing.It, along with its' sister 1964 Bronston mega-production, "The Fall of The Roman Empire", served to sink the producer's four year Spanish production company and end his fairly short career as a film mogul. In those four years he produced, besides the two films already mentioned, "King of Kings", "55 Days at Peking", and "El Cid". No independent producer had ever attempted so ambitious an undertaking, which made Bronston's failure perhaps even more spectacular than the films he attempted.