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The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales

1972
Romance, Comedy
1h 51m
Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini's sexually explicit retelling of "The Canterbury Tales" take Chaucer's famous stories into the realm of wild expressionism and beyond. Filmed on location in England, Pasolini's "Canterbury Tales" brings the bawdy world of Chaucer vividly to life, complete with a rendering of hell that would have made Hieronymus Bosch proud. (rottentomatoes.com)
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The Canterbury Tales

1972
Romance, Comedy
1h 51m
Your probable score
Avg Percentile 47.97% from 325 total ratings

Ratings & Reviews

(325)
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Rated 15 Dec 2009
47
33rd
Imagine 'R' rated Monty Python's Holy Grail that isn't funny, and you'll get the idea about this film.
Rated 14 Aug 2007
58
18th
Disappointing effort from Pasolini. There's some funny and irreverent stuff, but it's mostly quite immature and relies on gratuitous sex and nudity to keep the viewer's interest.
Rated 20 Sep 2018
3
21st
Hey, Satan! Lift up your tail! Show us where you keep the friars in Hell!!
Rated 27 Jan 2014
39
36th
Clumsy reimagining of Chaucer that seems to have a gnostic moral: a challenge to the voyeuristic nature of cinema. (It made me re-evaluate Saló a bit.) Going by a documentary on the Criterion DVD I viewed, I think the planned order of tales might have worked better.
Rated 23 Apr 2016
45
23rd
While it has the best scene of the whole trilogy (hell sequence), overall I've found it to be the least engaging of the three.
Rated 06 Nov 2013
4
13th
Keep in mind that this came out in 1971, a time by which various movements had significantly reshaped our cinematic landscape, yet somehow, Pasolini assumed it'd be a great idea to come up with this kind of ugly, vile and immature piece of work.
Rated 04 Aug 2017
20
5th
WTF do people see in this garbage? Some lewdity and costuming aside, this is worthless.
Rated 31 Dec 2013
50
67th
Although this one is, for me, not a favorite, it contains, at times, enjoyable-- sometimes fascinating-- elements [photography, etc., and, probably most importantly, Pasolini's examination of language itself].
Rated 18 May 2012
56
15th
A disappointment after the first part of the Trilogy of Life. Far(t) too many fart jokes.
Rated 04 Feb 2017
50
26th
Pasolini's anti-bourgeois, anti-authoritarian stance was typical of leftist intellectuals of his day, and he spent much of his career railing against conventional notions of propriety and 'good taste', reaching peak 'decadence' with his late colour works. But while Decameron was a cheeky middle finger to pious sexual morality, T.C.T just seems indulgent, like a cheap Fellini knockoff ala Satyricon directed by Larry Flynt or Alfred E.Newman. It has its moments, but not nearly enough of them.
Rated 13 Sep 2018
70
35th
The production design is every bit as beautifully realized as in The Decameron, perhaps even more so, and there are some laughs here and there, but overall, Canterbury Tales seems somewhat listless and hollow in comparison. Still, not without merit.
Rated 19 Jan 2019
60
26th
Not sure why some people like this other than it being entertainingly bad. Come for the sex, stay for the cringe. The hell scene is pretty imaginative though.
Rated 15 Apr 2019
74
32nd
Very amusing with grotesque characters, visuals and sounds. Lost its way towards the end, even though the hell sequence made up for it slightly.
Rated 23 May 2020
40
5th
I watched this right after watching The Decameron, and, aside from a few changes of tights and some backgrounds, it feels like much more of the same. (The underlying books, admittedly, did deal with some of the same raunchy humor.) A little too much for me, although the final scene was certainly unforgettable.
Rated 16 Aug 2022
65
29th
Maybe it's because Pasolini as an Italian has more affinity with Boccaccio's Decameron or maybe there are other reasons, but while Il Decameron has a satirical edge to it that still feels topical today this second installment of Pasolini's Trilogy of Life feels way slighter and ends up being more a very well directed and entertaining sex comedy than a still relevant satire.

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