Diagonaldi Very well executed

TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Twilightfa Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

hou-3 My goodness, this is an awful film. It's like a teenager's take on Chaucer's masterpiece, stripping away everything except the bawdy. In essence it's soft core porn set in beautiful locations. There is some mild amusement to be got from identifying the NT properties, cathedrals and half-timbered buildings that form the backdrop to the endless succession of gurning faces and cavorting naked bodies, but that is about it. There is no sense at all of a pilgrimage going on and the constant use of folk song from a much later period is jarring.I am at a loss as to why Pasolini made the film but whatever his reason, it's best forgotten.

ladybug2535 The settings and costumes were period perfect--it's too bad, really too bad that this movie suffered from such bad editing and terrible acting. The Canterbury Tales is a collection of separate stories full of humor, puns and sexual escapades. The movie manages to capture the humor and sexual escapades including lots of full frontal nudity for both sexes, and the "appearance" of numerous sexual acts (though it's not pornography) but there is nothing to hang the different stories together, and little effort to even make the individual tales have any kind of coherence (especially as they quote from the stories in Middle English. This was an admirable project but it fails in terms of any real cinematic value. It's a shame, I really wanted to like it, and as so many say, the settings and the costumes truly reflect the period, and were the best parts of the movie. The worst part is the acting--but if you've read the stories and are interested in the period, the movie is worth watching, and you may appreciate the humor--it does reflect the Middle Ages in all of it's rudeness and lust for life (if anything the movie tones it down for modern audiences)---just don't expect much more than that.

tomgillespie2002 Continuing his 'Trilogy of Life' cycle exploring medieval literature, The Canterbury Tales by Pier Paolo Pasolini, delves into some of the tales weaved within Geoffrey Chaucer's famous stories. It explores the myriad sexual depravities and allusions with bawdy gusto, featuring almost every perversion known, from voyeurism, flagellation, homosexuality, to even the "love" of a watermelon. The disparate, prurient tales are interwoven with Pasolini plays Chaucer here at his writing desk, imaging his lasciviousness upon villagers. There is even a strange comic interlude paying homage to Charlie Chaplin, in the form of Pasolini regular, Ninetto Davoli.Whilst the visual style is similar to The Decameron (1970 - Dante Feretti again is art director), the stories do not intertwine as well here, which could create some confusion in the viewer. With a largely British cast (including Tom Baker, Hugh Griffith, Jeeny Runacre, and even Robin Askwith), the film film sometimes feels like a slightly less repressed 1970's British sex comedy (Carry On Canterbury, if you like). With its delight in sexual promiscuity and perversion, it is certainly one of Pasolini's less than intellectual affairs, and even fails to humour. Unless of course your funny bone is easily pleased by fart jokes.With a bizarre finale set in hell (its visual design clearly inspired by the painting of Hieronymus Bosch), we see an over-sized Satan shitting out some plebeian folks, to the obscene delight of those scattered round the pits. Whilst this incredibly short ending is disgustingly joyous, it fails to save a very scatological film, that vies more towards the crass than the enlightening.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU We know where we are – in England – with the songs and music, the looks of these people, the way they dress, the way they look, the faces they make and the faces they have, their violent games and the first jest, and the first joke, sets the action in a fighting ring with a red lady dressed in so much crimson sanguine velvet that she looks like a cardinal, the bird of course. And the hats, Lord, or the way they dress their hairs. Holbein, Rembrandt and the Flemish school, and yet their inns cum nunneries cum brothels cum stables and a lot of welcoming remarks are real enclosed farcical and at times lethal bordellos. Most festivities take place in big halls. That's England isn't it, cold and rainy, uncertain and wet, at least as for the climate and the weather. The garden of Eden with Adam and Eve and Pan fingering his pipe is not bad at all, looking like a Stonehenge of well trimmed bush pillars. The most intriguing sequence is that of the homosexuals who are tricked into sex by some agents of the church, but only to be proposed a choice: pay or burn on the griddle. One is rich and goes through. The other is poor and burns. The scene is amplified by the dais and the canopies all around the quadrangle where it happens, by the velvet of the dresses and by the silence, by the kids watching the show, the green lawn of this quadrangle surrounded by Norman or Tudor architecture, the bringing of the faggots by half nude teens before the bringing in of the gay yelling faggot, his being tied on the griddle, the lateness of the priest and his cross and the silence again when the flames finally engulf the man. And all is seen through the eyes of a bun-vendor who does not say a word and roams behind everyone. And it is all calculated by the local bishop with the help of a consenting youth who plays the bait. And the mute witness is later revealed to be the devil enjoying the show set up for him by the good old Christian men and women. And there we start descending into a Flemish vision of Hell. And Hell is on earth with Charlie Chaplin arriving in the picture, accompanied by the traditional music of his mute films on a pipe, the cops, the cheating at the soup distribution, the cane and the bowler hat, the bored bride in a wedding, the monstrous father of the wimp bridegroom that gets creamed with the wedding cake, the strict family but the cheating mother who feeds bad Charlie in the back of the father, even a job shining, or should I say, polishing eggs, playing dice with what Dickens would have called street Arabs, and Shakespeare scoundrels I guess. And he introduces us in his dream of a bawdy paradise on earth, interrupted by two cops who arrest him and put him in a pillory. Add to that the flood. And the red widow strutting across this mess. In England religion has been turned into a business, a sham, a parody, a farce, a social carnival in which a windmill grinds corn without turning its wings, but it does not matter since the miller is a thief. But Chaucer in the film leads us to another inn-brothel of England. And an angel will take you to Hell and you better like devils and Satan and you will discover where all the friars are kept in Hell by Satan himself. You'll drown in a real colic of friars all over the world directly from under the tail of His Lord Satan. Amen for sure.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines