ThiefHott Too much of everything

Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

Tockinit not horrible nor great

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

John Hope Despite Brother Sun, Sister Moon has a stunning photography, epic music, and amazing actors, the true value of this movie is the ability to reset your soul and let you enter Francesco's heart. The movie actually drives you into the exact mood of Francesco (and the Zeffirelli's Flower Power message): "return to the roots of purity and love" This is one of my favorites movies ever, everything is at it's best: the camera is like a paintbrush, the actors are more than real, the music can move you and let you cry. I recommend this movie to anybody who is willing to clean his spirit from outside noise. It works, once watched, you will feel changed.

ajoyce-222-935612 Where do I begin? This film plays like a clumsy morality play, not a first-run film. The acting and direction is so ham-fisted, he even has Donovan singing what should be obvious about the story's message from watching the movie. It takes little account of church politics, only tipping the director's hand to this reality in the final scene that seems to so irritate lovers of this film. The fact is, Pope Innocent III would have to have been an idiot to miss the opportunity to absorb St. Francis' movement. Making a martyr of him would only have made things worse for the Church. (In real life the Pope was reluctant to sanction the Order but relented when he had a dream of St. Francis supporting the church. Which only proves my point.) Zefirelli plays into the Myth of the Righteous Poor, the 'dignity' of poverty and labour. In that sense the Franciscan Order truly is a godsend to the church hierarchy. They can sanction it as a kind of penitence for their own opulent lifestyle as a means of pointing to the actual message of Christ. And it keeps people enslaved to the existing economic-religious order, asking nor expecting nothing and certainly no threat to Catholic authority.Brother Sun, Sister Moon thus becomes little more than a propaganda piece for Christian theology and misses the most interesting aspects of St. Francis' life and message. For instance there is little acknowledgement of his attachment to Nature and animals. I would have preferred an honest story that told of the obstacles, struggles, pain and suffering the Franciscan Order would have to have undergone, and how they coped as a community. There are inevitable questions and difficulties arising from such a break with society, worthy a goal as it may be. How are these met? Brother Sun and Sister Moon never goes deeper than surface level. Instead we get dogma. The film is as some reviewers have noted, a product of its time, when many intentional communities ('communes') were breaking away from mainstream Western society to live a more Nature-centred, less materialistic way of life. But even this message is subsumed in the movie to the doctrinaire aspects of Christian theology. The only reason I give this 3 out of 10 is because the production values are first-rate, the costumes incredible, the locations magnificent. Thoroughly professional but ultimately, a misfire. Read a biography of St. Francis instead.

lasttimeisaw A narcissistic portrayal of St. Francis' enlightenment and fully equipped with a melancholiac rural beauty of the nature, the ramifications are generally benign, albeit for recreation only.Structurally this is a prequel of Rossellini's THE FLOWER OF ST. FRANCIS (Francesco, giullare di Dio 1950), divided rightly by the before/after of Francis' pilgrimage towards Rome, at once with radically opposed visual punches, a perfect set for a double-feature, color Vs. black and white, lavish versus austere.The nearly non-Italian cast (excludes Valentina Cortese) is dubbed with Italian in the version I watched yesterday, it inevitably thwarted the fluency of the film, which, as a matter of fact, could be mostly paid no heed to as the performances are ludicrously overblown, particularly Graham Faulkner's Francis, Zeffirelli's personal preference triumphs in this film in every respect, the unrealistic beauty of St. Francis and his apostles is to meet the eyes only! Alec Guiness did an unanticipated role as the Pope Innocent III in the rear part of the film, where the setting in Rome evokes the similar tableaux in the ever-famous Chinese Monkey King story when he encounter the emperor of all-gods in his palace (the west-east correlation is unbelievably tangible!).So, personally I cannot endure the over-dramatic enactment of this biographic film, however the narrative clings closely to the story itself, while the cinematography of the bucolic Assisi is captivating enough to engross me attentively, yet my deepest sympathy is that the epiphany which I expected had never arrived.

zetes Francis of Assissi depicted as the first hippie. That's not really a ridiculous comparison. After all, Godspell depicts Jesus and the Apostles as hippies, as well, far more annoyingly, I may say, than Zefferelli depicts these characters. I actually started off really enjoying this picture. I thought it was sweet, lovely, and beautiful. It helps a lot if you like Donovan. I know that he's kind of dopey, but I've always found his mellowing tunes quite pleasant. None of his songs here are among his best (in fact, not a one appears on the anthology I own, which contains other work on soundtracks), but they're pretty good. Unfortunately, the film never really goes anywhere. It plateaus early and only reaches a little further in its climax, when Francis and his followers ask the Pope (Alec Guiness, in what amounts to a cameo) to bless their order. The only really good Francis of Assissi movie I've seen is Roberto Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis.