The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Full of lyricism and beautiful images, this is easily the best (or one of the very best) movies about christ ever made.

The bold realism and utter lack of Hollywoodization gives the film an undefinable quality, but a powerful one. The handheld work was especially effective in bringing the story to life. The music and editing is quite bold, too. Pasolini wastes no time, nothing is superfluous. There are no loving, lingering shots of a perfectly groomed Christ bathed in a beam of light. Irazoqui's performance is stern and determined, his portrayal of Jesus is far from the typical gentle, saintly one we're used to.

I can't really point to anything wrong with it, it's very well shot, well acted, well paced and is apparently faithful to the source material. Despite all this something felt really odd about it, possibly due to Pasolini's beliefs. While Christ is the clear centre of the film, and of many shots, there's a detachment that doesn't quite fit what you'd expect. I'm not sure this is bad, in fact intellectually I like the idea a lot, it's just that it was distracting in that I really didn't expect it.

Simultaneously the most sacred and least pious cinematic telling of the Christ story. In part told in a quasi-documentary style, yet a large number of the shots are clearly indebted to the history of religious (and in particular Italian) painting, indicating that this is if anything a documentation not of the life of Jesus but of two thousand years of religious culture, but one focused on the politically revolutionary aspects of Christ's message that existence lies somewhere beyond subsistence.

The frantic pace, the dizzling cinematography and the relentless action might be off-putting to some, as Sam Jackson's band of fierce 'pogo-stick-police men' chase Terrence Stamp's chilling hyppo-riding hippie-baddie through downtown Pola... wait. I most have dozed off. Oh no! That movie is still on! oh GOD! YOU'RE JESUS FUCKING CHRIST FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE!!!! DOOOOO SOOMETHIIIIING!!!

Leave it to a gay atheist to make the best Jesus film of all time.

It can be difficult to enjoy neorealistic works due to their nature, but the appreciation for the style always wins over when a vision rings as true as this.

(Viewed on 22/04/14): A stark vision of Jesus that is the antithesis of the overproduced biblical epics of Hollywood, T.G.O.S.M must have seemed like an extraordinarily radical work in its time. It's an unusually gritty historical film with an almost Bressonian sense of detachment. While the B+W cinematography has a raw beauty, Christ is not painted as a luminous figure but rather as a political dissident who is compassionate but fiercely driven. It's Pasolini's most affecting work.

A great looking picture, with extremely stark black and white photography that make that period of time look that much more real. Pasolini's use of the unknown and unprofessional actors is one of a seemingly natural beauty. The Gospel According to St. Matthew is an epic film with Italian Neorealist qualities that make it just that much more beautiful.

The Biblical Jesus Christ was punk rock. And nothing is more punk rock than one of humanity's most spiritual entities stripped raw of artifice and embellishment, two millennia of dogma, shouting with authenticity. Wholesale sequences consist of letting the Red Letters do the talking. Pasolini's punk aim was to use film form to find the (divine) Son of God through the (revolutionary) Son of Man - how well this works is still open to individual interpretation. Alone this is masterpiece worthy.

I'm all for neorealism and as far as that goes this is very good, but as for the content it's really just a bloke going around spouting his opinions to anyone who'll listen, which gets old after a while.

Pasolini's Jesus is a political revolutionary who hates hipocrisy, which is all good and well (made in post-fascist Italy and all), but it feels like a lot of the time, he spends more time reciting well-known rhetoric at the audience than at the actual plot. Pasolini seems to want to reboot Jesus, but ironically ends up a bit to respectful to Jesus; he could have lobbed a grenade at the audience here. Still, when it works, it's glorious.

Bored me to death. I think if I were the slightest bit Christian, I'd have gotten more out of it, but ... to me, it was just a boring story in which nothing happened. Beautifully shot, but ... YAWN

Why is it so lauded? It's a nearly word-for-word adaptation of a not particularly good book. Pasolini goes for a slightly slicker, modernized aesthetic, but the only innovation is in the stylisations and, probably, the epic scope. Other than that, this fairytale is as old and boring as rocks, and creepy as ever.

There is an irresistible inertia to this film. You know exactly what is going to happen next (it’s a well know story!), but it is nevertheless utterly compelling from beginning to end. It plays not as a cohesive narrative, but as a series of vivid revelations (as it ought to). Pasolini realises cinema in such a way that Jesus manifests as Christ on Earth in a totally convincing way; a divine being in human form. Pasolini makes film act as a profane screen onto which the sacred is projected.

Star this if you rated Salo higher, hell yeah let's go watch some people eat some other people's shit again.

Unbelievably moving in its simplicity. Maybe the most authentically ancient-feeling film I've ever seen; strangely enough, its almost self-consciously eclectic soundtrack is a big part of that. Rarely has a director - or any artist, for that matter - had an eye for human faces like Pasolini's. That he was able to cast such a wide variety of amateurs and direct them to such moving performances - even the dozens of bit players - is astonishing.

love it !

Pasolini somehow made the story appear as bold & radical as it is humble & reverent. Some weirdly direct depictions of miracles only slightly broke the poetic integrity for me. I'm not sure if the fast pace made this feel urgent or rushed. I like that it didn't turn into fetishistic pandering but it also didn't establish much analytical context for the relevance & effect of the story. If you have no interest in Jesus (you probably should though) this doesn't really try hard to make you care.

I've heard about it being Marxist, so I hoped Pasolini would add something to the table, but it's just a faithfull retelling of the story without all the later Christian romanticizng about virgin Mary etc. If I were objective I would probably have to say that it's a very good film, but I'm not and personally I found it quite boring, probably based on the fact, that I've heard the story like 100 times. If aliens visited Earth I would probably recommend it to them, though.

Sorry Paso, this is boring as hell! If I would decide to be Christian, I could read the Bible. We've heard the same story 1000 times anyway! I mean, this film is absolutely & profoundly pointless.(Thank you God, I'm not a believer at all!)

Oh come on, this film is a pile of crap. Nowhere near the austere purity of something like a Bresson film, the whole thing is just laughable and inept.

Nice to see a Jesus movie that isn't ridiculously overwrought and needing to treat every moment as if it were the most sacrosanct profundity. Who would have thought that a simple, humble, realist presentation would be effective for the story of a man who's message is predicted on humility? Really makes you hmm.

Ebert got it right: ""The Gospel According to St. Matthew," tells the life of Christ as if a documentarian on a low budget had been following him from birth." There are, indeed, some beautiful and harrowing scenes (like the scene on the desert and the scene of Jesus walking on the sea), but on the whole the movie failed to impress me as I expected. But it's definitely worth seeing.

And also according to Karl Marx. Pasolini, a Leftist and atheist, dips into his sacred source material with a highly suspicious selectivity, and extracts an image of Jesus Christ as a revolutionary.

pasolini's masterpiece

nice commie pic but not nearly gay enough

Not terribly exciting, but extremely accurate portrayal of the Gospel.

Extremely faithful to the text, with unflinching nods to Neorealism. A professor of mine once said, "If you're going to make a Gospel film, don't. But if you do make a Gospel film, make it like Pasolini."

Strange, rough-around-the-edges film (like Cassevetes filming The Holy Book). I'm not a religious guy, though I'm sure that's not enough reason as to why I was lukewarm with this one. Maybe it was the terribly awful camera-work. Actually, that was hilarious, might've been the best aspect of this dreary film.

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IF you consider all of Matthew to be only of one writer. IF you don't follow the German Critical Method then well... you might buy this. And there is a whole bunch of stuff in there that would make you very uncomfortable if I said it so hey.. take it at face value. You can see I did.

159

Ascetic and austere masterpiece from Passolini. Blew me away.

I'm sorry but this is just boring - yeah it is nice to link Jesus as this proto-Marxist character, but that's it. Amateur cast and you can figure that out by watching it yourself. Stupid editing. Everything sounds great on paper, that is to say in theory but the practice is where you fail or not, and this does not succeed.

The anachronisms stick out enough to pull you out of the story (the Pharisees didn't look like Jews and the landscape didn't look like the Levant, and while I loved the soundtrack there were moments that it didn't fit); I was almost expecting a Monty Python routine to follow. Yet it stays close to the stripped-down gospel and portrays a slightly more revolutionary Jesus than we're used to seeing.

Estasi te meta phovo theo akosomen toagio evangelio

Holy shit! O Agamben é um apóstolo!

Rewatch: the greatest movie about religion of all-time, it gets better every time you see it (easily my favorite Pasolini)

Technically this film is nearly flawless but for some reason I didn't find it exciting at all.

I wish i could appreciate this more, but i'd be lying if i said that it didn't start to seriously drag after a while, especially since i already knew the ending. All joking aside, i admire what Pasolini was attempting here. After bringing a mythic quality to neorealism in his earlier films, it makes sense that here he would bring a neorealist approach to a mythical/historical story. Ultimately he just plays it a bit too straight for my taste, lacking the strangeness of Oedipus Rex or even Medea.

181

Shot mainly in an almost documentary style from a bystander's POV, and with a thematically appropriate but conspicuously anachronistic soundtrack. The effect is a lessening of historical distance, as if we could be witnessing the story in the present day, but the corollary is that is feels kind of like watching a local church Easter pageant. Pasolini seems content to simply reenact the chronology of the book, so it's a bit dry, but it does convey a good sense Jesus vexing the authorities.

This was a bit of a mixed bag for me. A fairly close adaptation of the New Testament (down to using the actual biblical language). There are parts that are very beautiful, but the performances all seem a bit flat. He used mostly (or all) nonprofessional actors, which always seems to me to have this result. The director's mother plays an older Mary and is actually pretty good. Jesus's unibrow is fairly distracting. It's not bad for what it is, but I don't get the hype.

#179