The Gospel According to Matthew (1966)

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I've tried to agree with the many opinions here.The high rate of the movie. I don't have many movies which irritate me, but this is definitely one of them. I kept in mind it's from 1964. But the movie is very slow, and the actor who plays Jesus annoys me deeply. Even when he says the standard things you hear in all the movies, with him it sounds like arrogance. If you don't follow him, you're not worthy of him? I seriously was in agony while trying to watch this movie and I can't see how this movie has ever scored above a 5.. I probably miss something others do see. I've seen almost every movie about Jesus, this is by far the worst one I've seen. He carries hasn't been beaten once, and he can't carry his cross longer then one step?!

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) certainly is different from most other Passion presentations. The look of the film is rather rustic, as most is filmed in natural, outdoor, settings. The cities of Matera and Apuilia are supplemented by some sixteen other Italian locales, all highly artistic yet natural.There's an absence of elaborate costuming and period sets, with an often stark look giving at times a documentary feel to the proceedings. Pasolini's Christ, played by Enrique Iirazoqui, is quite level-headed in his orations and lacking in dramatics.The DVD I received is a "doctored up" 90 minute colorized version with dubbed English dialogue, which I feel doesn't do justice to the original work. However, the disc contains as one of its supplemental features, the black and white 137 minute film. The latter, I feel, is the film Pasolini made and the one to see.Since this writing a Blu Ray disc has been released (in 2012) with the 137 minute timing; I'm sure this is the preferred version to have.The music, from Bach to Odetta, is certainly one of the film's more intriguing aspects which supplements a most original rendering of this often filmed story.

Pier Paolo Pasolini is a filmmaker noted for his daringness and audacity both within his films and his life. This filming of the life of Christ is certainly both of those. This highly-moving masterpiece is one of his finest creations, a work of harmony and beauty. The reason the film works so well is its faith in images rather than sound. Pasolini conveys the beauty of the scripture through the movement of his actors and the very expressions of their faces. When they do speak, it feels true rather than contrived. Shot in Southern Italy on a low budget using the Italian Neo-realist style of non-professional actors, Pasolini creates for us the greatest portrait of Christ in the movies and a thundering statement of morality and faith.

An extremely famous film about an extraordinarily famous Gospel, that of Saint Matthew, yet I am wondering what makes it different from so many other versions of that story. Even the music is not original. So what is? It is purely artistic, will I say, but what do I mean exactly? First Pasolini decided to shoot his film in black and white, or if you prefer all in gray. I would say that projects us into the past at once. We are in an old story we all know by heart or nearly and since it comes from so far away it does not need any colors. We are color-blind when remembering the distant past.Second the story is condensed essentially to the words of Jesus and the voice over of a narrator, or nearly just to that. Any other voice is particularly strong then, for example Peter denying his knowing Jesus three times. We don't need the cock after that.This story telling technique is to make us jump from one episode to another with absolutely no link in-between. Ellipse upon ellipse, our knowledge of the story links up the pieces of the tale. The vision then can be hyper simplified. No special costumes, no special sets, no special effects either. Just plain, simple, even brutal facts, nearly too brutal to actually be moving. It becomes cold after a while.Then the camera is used in the strangest way possible: slow long movements over vast distant landscapes alternate with close-up shots of faces or small numbers of characters. Very few scenes of action, violence or movement. We are nearly confronted to a still life that is so static that we are like turning the pages of a picture book or a book of engravings telling us the story.In those nearly immobile pictures Pasolini adds speech, and nothing else but speech, no dialogue, just Jesus in a way reciting his own gospel and a narrator linking up the bits and pieces. In such a still, slow, nearly stagnant succession of scenes that makes you jump over from one to the next as if it were a slide show you feel no emotion, no passion, just a message that is transmitted to you with as little interference as possible.Some say it is a masterpiece. It might have been but today it looks slightly sallowish if not faded. It remains an impressive message but it misses the human dimension, even if Jesus is the Son of Man and in a way not human. Pasolini has invented with this film a Franciscan cinematographic Passion, but there is a lot more about Jesus than this grayish panegyric of poverty and the poor.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID