Perry Kate Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Peereddi I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

Joanna Mccarty Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

chitown_babe Before other movies depicting the life of Christ, this was always my favorite. In my opinion, the best depiction of Christ's life was and still is the made for TV series, "Jesus of Nazareth". Robert Powell was a little "soap opera-ish" but overall he did a good job. There are many biblical errors in this version--mostly stressing the Protestant version of the Bible, but again, those were easily ignored. I thought the Magi were the BEST ever--especially Donald Pleasance. James Earl Jones wasn't bad either. Fernando Ray (Rey?) was also great! Today, my favorite religious movie is "The Passion of the Christ". There is no other biblical movie to date that can outdo this perfect depiction of the last three days of Jesus' life. Mel Gibson has his problems, but this movie is his shining accomplishment. (Apocalyto was awesome, too!)

LaDonna Keskes Watch it only to marvel at the costume design and Salomé's dance. The script sounds like some bad Sunday-morning gospel broadcast, the wigs and fake beards are laughable. Robert Ryan looks either doped-up or ashamed. There are over-long scenes of people exchanging Significant Looks! The infant-death scenes look like outtakes from The Ten Commandments.This is a ponderous sea slug of a movie that you might put up as a silent background to some kind of ironic party. Cecil B. obviously took himself and his own religious beliefs very seriously--you have to wonder why he didn't take up TV evangelism.

sddavis63 As a portrayal of the life of Jesus Christ, "King of Kings" hits the obvious high points. It has the feel of a spectacle - trying to do for the Gospels what "The Ten Commandments" did for the story of the exodus, but not succeeding as well. We see some of the birth narrative, Jesus' baptism, his temptation in the wilderness, his ethical teaching and of course his trial, death and resurrection. It's not all told in accordance with the biblical account. As often is the case, the story of his birth is a conflation of the accounts of Matthew and Luke (the magi did not visit a baby at the manger - they came to a child in a house!) Almost all of Jesus' ethical teachings are jammed together into a strangely extended Sermon on the Mount which goes on and on, although at least the ethical teachings are there, and there's an interesting portrayal of the trial of Jesus, complete with an advocate for the defence, explaining to Pilate why Jesus should not be crucified. It works - although it's a bit uneven - and it gets the point across. Jeffrey Hunter also did a credible job as Christ - a difficult role. He portrays a dignified Jesus, accepting of his mission even while sometimes tormented by it (such as in the temptation scene or in the Garden of Gethsemane.) Jesus with piercing blue eyes, mind you, seems out of place. To its credit, the movie also deals in a little greater depth with the resurrection, which many film-makers either shy away from or treat in a cursory manner. Those are all strengths for the most part.Unfortunately, the strengths are balanced by more than a few weaknesses. Shall we start with the narration by Orson Welles. It was usually extra- biblical, offering sometimes unnecessary commentary. It was distracting and detracted from the flow of the movie, making it seem unfortunately choppy. Hunter aside, I found the performances in this underwhelming, leading to what I found to be a rather cold, emotionless feel to the story - a feel heightened by Welles' rather monotone narration. I felt especially that Robert Ryan underplayed John the Baptist - a rather wild biblical character whose essence Ryan didn't seem to capture for me. There were also some additions to the story - such as a portrayal of the rebellion led by Barabbas - that were interesting enough but probably not necessary.The most obvious comparison to this would be "The Greatest Story Ever Told," which came out a few years later. It had a higher profile cast, and a more emotional feel to it, but Jeffrey Hunter was better as Jesus than Max von Sydow was. It's hard to choose between them. Both have strengths; both are flawed. The life of Jesus is a tough story to put on film. I think such a movie needs a more specific focus (such as "The Passion" or "The Last Temptation") or it needs to try to take a lighter, less serious approach, which can still get the point across (like "Godspell.") To try to portray Jesus' entire life in such a serious manner, but also to make it work as a Hollywood production, doesn't seem to work well for me. (5/10)

chaos-rampant I read a highly amusing bit in the trivia section that I want to share here - apparently the crucifixion had to be reshot because preview audiences reported back offended by a hairy chest. So let this be a revealing irony behind so many whitewashed historic spectacles; movies so often print images that we want to see.But since there is clearly not enough spectacle in this legend, unlike so many Biblical epics as DeMille defined the genre, so loose scripture that pivots around big splashy entertainment on nothing short of a monumental scale, nothing short of waters parting and a temple being toppled, since in its essence, this is a story of humble origins and deep emotion, so Barabbas becomes the hardened guerilla fighter who leads Judean rebels against Roman oppressors.There are two battle scenes here, both ill-advised and distracting. The rest is a common Hollywood Jesus narrative, emphasis on the piercing gaze of virtue and the rod of suffering as the tree of life, blame once more shifted to Romans and the Herods - stressed to be of Arab descent.It doesn't work - it is clunky, feels patched together, formulaic filler when it steers away from the tragic scene. But this reveals something else, let's call it the Italian connection.Now Hollywood at around this time, certainly after the monumental success of Ben Hur, was busy filming casts of thousands in Italy outside Rome, North Africa, Spain and the Almerian desert. The Italians had inspired this tradition as far back as the silent era, and the original Ben Hur had also filmed there, but now all these huge American productions were rolling in, well equipped, professional, helmed by directors of note, and young Italian filmmakers could not hope for a better film school. Many tutored there, including Leone.Why I deem this important to mention, is because this type of film is where the new cinematic language for action films was being forged that would last until a few years ago and is still in the process of being replaced now by the Orson Welles eye.Nicholas Ray was not the man for this project, which I assume was tighly supervised by MGM hoping for another cash cow, and he only gets to bring his colors - those ruby reds and deep cyans, they might as well have spilled over from the cavernous sets of Johnny Guitar. But just look at the kind of filmmaking going on in a few key instances, say the exchange of very tight close-ups of eyes when the Baptist meets Jesus by the river, or the amazing series of operatic panels for the crucifixion, really the only scene worth watching here.They look jumbled and out of their proper order, as though the rest of the film was filmed by clerks. It is going to be breath-taking when Leone unfolds them from the scrunched bunch of celluloid and are made to stretch across rolls of punctuated silence. The catch is that his operas were about scoundrels, but they resonated with something akin to spiritual clarity.So Ray, a filmmaker to watch on a good day, doesn't get it right here, but mostly I believe because spectacle was imposed on him and he only applied colors, not really fussing over arrangements except in the finale. And this particular story can only resonate in its true beauty when the son of God teaches with a dust-caked mouth and bleeds ascetically, and the air is not all musky and baroque but smells of earthly scents.Orson Welles narrates this and is unusually restrained. He had appeared in one of those Biblical epics in Italy a few years back, directing his own scenes for what must have been a tremendous seminar for everyone in attendance. He would appear the next year as a director making a Biblical film in Italy, in a film by the one man who got this story right, an Italian.