Ameriatch One of the best films i have seen

Manthast Absolutely amazing

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

jamesleggio-40957 One of the underlying problems with Michael Cimino's film is that it makes the remarkable Sicilian countryside do too much of the narrative work. If you were to watch the film with the sound turned off -- saving you from the stilted dialogue and the gushy score -- you might think much better of the whole enterprise, so powerful is the photography of those rugged mountains and steep canyons. But everything is so visually splendid that it undermines any sense that the poor are actually suffering and starving out there. A travelogue does not always make for good storytelling. And, of course, the pan-and-scan version, the only one currently available on DVD, chops out most of the landscape, limiting the impact of the movie's visual achievement.Another problem for Cimino's film is that there's actually a much better version of the same story from an earlier director. Few people seem to be aware of the earlier treatment. In 1962, the great Italian director Francesco Rosi released his superb version under the title "Salvatore Giuliano." It's in black and white, but gloriously so. The massacre of the peasants in Rosi's version is one of the most heartbreaking and dramatically memorable sequences in the history of Italian film. And throughout, the dark ambiguity of the main character remains consistently compelling, within a far more complex storytelling mode than Cimino's surprisingly straightforward Hollywood-inflected retelling. The Rosi film deserves to be much better known.

smatysia I read the novel by Mario Puzo quite a few years ago, but do not remember a thing about it, unlike most other Puzo works that I have consumed. So, maybe the source material was a bit lacking. If I remember correctly, Michael Cimino had already destroyed one studio, and well, I don't know how much was invested in this one, but I hope not too much. Cimino was obviously shooting for the sweeping epic, but ended up hitting soap opera level melodrama. The high points were the scenery, the cinematography, and the score. The low points were the plot and the acting. Christopher Lambert badly needed a charisma injection before trying to play this part. Joss Ackland was adequate as the mafia don, and Terence Stamp as the enigmatic prince, but the rest of the cast, ick. Cannot recommend this one.

Sturgeon54 I've seen about four of director Michael Cimino's films, and every time I see one I feel like I am watching an attempt to create the equivalent of opera within the film medium. All of Cimino's films are filled with things one would often expect to find in the opera: emotional soliloquies, multi-layered mob conflicts, varied ethno-religious pageants filling the screen, extended love scenes, contrasting symbolisms between murky and bright color schemes, and plenty of furious soul-searching by its male characters following unexpected death and despair. Plus, like opera, his films are LONG.The problem is that the old Italian conventions of the opera are not what most American audiences and even critics want to see. That is my theory for why his films have never gained the kind of respect he would probably get if he were a purely European director. My guess is that one day they will - alongside someone like Sergio Leone, whose work is quite similar.A film treatment of a melodramatic novel by Mario Puzo about a Robin Hood-type (emphasis on the "hood") outlaw stealing from the Sicilian gentry to give to the peasants in Fascist 1930s Italy is really the best possible setting I've seen for a Cimino film. His style of multi-layered art filmmaking was just not compatible for the American West of the 1880s in "Heaven's Gate." Here, he is using an incredibly literate screenplay (supposedly most of which was written by the literary legend Gore Vidal, the rest by author Steve Shagan), filled with endlessly quotable spiritual/political/philosophical dialogue and musings. Aiding this is the Nino Rota-esqe score by Cimino's usual musical composer David Mansfield.Subtle character development has never been the strong suite of Cimino; he explores bigger things in his films like mood, place, and theme. And in this respect, he really does deserve credit for putting the audience in the middle of 1930s Italy, with its cauldron of conflicts between indentured peasants, land-owning gentry, shifty politicians, and the self-righteous dons and pontiffs who control things behind the scenes. This would be an excellent movie to watch alongside "The Godfather III," also based upon the work of Puzo, to spot common themes. While nowhere near as groundbreaking or spectacular as The Godfather films, this movie does deserve its place as a companion piece in Puzo's screen adaptations. It's not a fast-paced Scorcese mafia film; it requires patience.

mjsprech The European-release version of "The Sicilian" is 31 minutes longer than the US version. Supposedly, the director was ordered to deliver a version under 2 hours, so he recut the film to render it incoherent with the expectation that Fox would have to release the complete film. Only, they went ahead and released the deliberately botched shorter cut. This may be apocryphal, but it would help explain the critical drubbing it got in this country. I was lucky enough to see the complete film in Paris and was mesmerized. Gore Vidal was denied credit for the screenplay, but the film has a literacy, intellectual depth and acidity that is pure Vidal; the character played by Terrance Stamp is essentially Vidal's stand-in. The only comparable film might be "The Godfather," but with an even stronger historic/political context. It is certainly the highpoint of Michael Cimino's career to date, and I'm one of those odd ducks that fervently admires "Heaven's Gate". If you can see this in Europe, or if it comes out over there on DVD and you have a region-appropriate DVD player, grab the opportunity to see it.