Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Micitype Pretty Good

MusicChat It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Morten_5 Pier Paolo Pasolini is considered by many film critics one of the greatest directors in the history of Italian cinema. "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" is the first of his films that I have watched. What strikes me is the combined beauty and simplicity - the composition, the art direction, the costume design, the cinematography and the music. Shot mostly in Italy, with some scenes filmed in Ouarzazate, Morocco, this is an interpretation of the life of Christ well worth watching.

gavin6942 Along a rocky, barren coastline, Jesus begins teaching, primarily using parables. He attracts disciples; he's stern, brusque, and demanding. He comes to bring a sword, not peace, he says. He's in a hurry, moving from place to place near the Sea of Galilee, sometimes attracting a multitude, sometimes being driven away.The director reportedly chose Matthew's Gospel over the others because he had decided that "John was too mystical, Mark too vulgar, and Luke too sentimental." An interesting analysis, and more interesting that he picked just one rather than combine them as people tend to do. Given Pasolini's well-known reputation as an atheist, a homosexual, and a Marxist, the reverential nature of his film could come as a surprise at a first approach.The film received mostly good reviews from critics, including several Christian critics. Philip French called it "a noble film," and Alexander Walker said that "it grips the historical and psychological imagination like no other religious film I have seen. And for all its apparent simplicity, it is visually rich and contains strange, disturbing hints and undertones about Christ and his mission." The Vatican allegedly said it was the best version of Jesus' life on film. How strange that a homosexual, atheist revolutionary could tell the story so well... or perhaps it is not strange at all?

Jackson Booth-Millard I found this Italian film in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I read more about and saw its positive reviews, it definitely sounded worth the effort, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom). Basically this film is as the title says, it is about the life of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, according to the gospel of Saint Matthew (Ferruccio Nuzzo). The film starts with the story of young Mary (Margherita Caruso) and Joseph (Marcello Morante) seeking shelter for her to give birth, they find a stable, baby Jesus is born, and they escape a threat from King Herod I (Amerigo Bevilacqua). Years later Jesus Christ (Enrique Irazoqui) works as a carpenter, he gains followers, disciples, from performing his miracles to feed the hungry and heal the weak, and praising and preaching to people about the love of God. But Jesus, the son of God and the prophesied messiah, is also feared by people in the Roman kingdom, particularly coming to the attention of the Pharisees, the chief priests, and elders. Following the "Last Supper" and the betrayal by Judas (Otello Sestili), Jesus is arrested by the Romans, tried and sentenced to be crucified, he dies on the cross, but three days later he rises from the dead to give a final message to the believers before disappearing to go to Heaven. Also starring Susanna Pasolini as older Mary, Mario Socrate as John the Baptist, Settimio Di Porto as Peter, Giacomo Morante as John, Alfonso Gatto as Andrew, Luigi Barbini as James, Giorgio Agamben as Philip, Guido Cerretani as Bartholomew, Rosario Migale as Thomas, Marcello Galdini as James son of Alphus, Elio Spaziani as Thaddeus, Enzo Siciliano as Simon, Juan Rodolfo Wilcock as Caiphus, Alessandro Clerici as Pontius Pilate, Francesco Leonetti as Herod II, Franca Cupane as Herodiade and Paola Tedesco as Salome. Enrique Irazoqui gives a great gentle performance, I know the story of Jesus from various other film versions, this one needs no Hollywood bang to it, with its perfect classical music and simplistic story telling, the biggest moments are the smallest, e.g. a disfigured man healed in seconds, this is a good old fashioned very religious biblical drama. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Costume Design and Best Music for Luis Bacalov, and it was nominated the BAFTA for the UN Award. Very good!

tieman64 "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw One of the finest films about Jesus Christ, Pier Paolo Pasolini's "The Gosepl According To Saint Matthew" was nevertheless anticipated with a great deal of furore. How dare Pasolini, a homosexual, atheist and Marxist who was once arrested on charges of blasphemy for his offencive depiction of Jesus in the satirical short film "La Ricotta", direct a film about the Son of God? How dare he! Of course the film turned out to be far from sacrilegious. Even today, Christians adore its somewhat faithful retelling of Matthew's Gospel (Pasolini chose the book of Matthew because "John was too mystical, Mark too vulgar, and Luke too sentimental!"). If anything, it was Pasolini's Marxist admirers who regarded the work with confusion. How dare the rabble rousing director cave in to pietistic nostalgia and religious sentimentality? How dare he! But what Pasolini realised was that one need only be slavishly faithful to the scriptures to reveal that, at least in twentieth century political terms, Jesus was a proto-Marxist. In this regard, Pasolini ends the film with near subliminal shots of the scythe and sickle (common communist symbols used to advocate proletarian solidarity), has an economics student and student radical play Jesus (Enrique Irazoqui; younger and prettier than your typical celluloid Christ), hires leading Italian philosophers, communists and poets to play key parts and has his own mother play the mother of Christ, thereby aligning himself with the son of God and tasking artists with taking up radical causes. Elsewhere the film deals with a very Marxist urgency to bring "the ideal" down to earth, and Christ himself is treated as a radical intent on showing the oppressed the road to emancipation. Beyond this, Pasolini seems drawn to Jesus for other, more personal reasons. Though a non-believer (note the sceptical "according" in the film's title), Pasolini grew up in a religious household, retained a certain romantic fondness for Catholicism, and, like Jesus, spent much of his personal life as an outsider, mingling with the impoverished.Aesthetically, "Matthew" represents some of Pasolini's best work. Pasolini takes the quietly sublime tone of Carl Theodore Dreyer's religious films, lingering on wordless faces and beautifully expressive eyes, and marries them to a documentarian stance typical of cinema verite, his camera frequently hand-held, obstructed, and struggling to keep up with or catch glimpses of Jesus. In the way the film's neorealism clashes with the reverential, Pasolini's film therefore recalls Rossellini's "The Flowers of St Francis", a film he much admired. But while Rossellini's film centred on humble soldiers of Christ (Franciscan monks), Pasolini's goes off into more immoderate directions. His Christ possesses the bottled up rage of a young student radical, proselytises to the staccato rhythm of ultraist slogans/rallies and has his oppositions to local money-men, Pharisees and Romans shown to be less spiritually motivated than the product of a kind of harsh, hard-lined, intolerant, no-nonsense extremism; this is God's law, obey it! Understood? What you gonna do? Kill me? Go ahead, destiny my ass! This, of course, is where Martin Scorsese's gangster Christ would originate. But though Pasolini's "Jesus film" precedes Scorsese's (1988's "Last Temptation") by a number of decades, one might actually view it as a response to the later film. For Scorsese, and author Nikos Kazantzakis, Christ is turned into an existential conundrum: how can man "be good" when trapped in a mortal body "predisposed to sin"? These obsessions with "sinning" - which shrink age-old egoism vs altruism problems down to the kind of Catholic Guilt Syndrome which plagues lapsed Catholics (and give rise to the paradox typical of Scorsese's films, most of which are guiltily in love with the ecstasy of transgression) - are found throughout Scorsese's filmography. For Pasolini, though, Kazantzakis' dilemma is a non-issue. There is no original sin, human nature is contingent and man is always already something temporary, something which changes, without any permanent, lasting or stable reality. In this regard, Pasolini's films increasingly go on to marry the existential to the political. For Pasolini, personal wrestling is a dead end. It is ideologies, systems and power structures - ie "divine" or "social" laws - which shape both formal and informal institutions and stymie human behaviour. Or as Marx said, it is a change in the "ensemble of social relations" which change "the human essence." Interestingly, Pasolini's barebones retelling of Matthew's Gospel (he leaves out the magical stuff) has the unintentional effect of highlighting how bare-bones Christian mythology really is. If the film generates affect, it is largely because we bring a wealth of personal, religious and cultural baggage/familiarity to the film. Beyond these user generated ripples, the film's actual content is limited, which is to say, the spiritual content of Matthew's Gospel is near nil. As a religious text, the New Testament is confused at best, and as a communist folk hero, Jesus is small potatoes. A couple cherry picked verses about interest/profit being unjust, about "denying yourself", abolishing possessions, communal living, loving the poor, the cardinal sins and redistributing wealth, does not a Commie-Jesus make.On the flip side, religion's message of limit, restraint and the impossibility of transcendence in this world, is perhaps more pertinent now than in Pasolini's days. Today's ideology of limitless growth turns Christianity on its head: it injects an otherworldly cosmology into an apparently secular context. Instead of promising happiness in the hereafter, it offers something just as impossible: a happy, limitless eternity in the here-and-now.Incidentally, "Gospel's" look and score (a cultural cross-section of religiosity, one song of which is "homaged" in Scorsese's "Casino") would heavily influence a number of Martin Scorsese's films. Pasolini would also prove a huge influence on Rainer Werner Fassbinder.9/10 - Worth two viewings. See Rossellini's "The Messiah".