Critics reviews

It cost $44 million to make, but it seems an awful lot of that money ended up on screen at least. Cleopatra's triumphal entry into Rome is a sequence as yet unmatched for sheer pageantry and absurd decadence. The fact that, strictly speaking, it isn't essential for moving the story forward actually makes it the film's most essential sequence.

Despite its huge budget and elaborate production, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's colossal four-hour-long spectacle, from 1963, is a personal artistic project of the highest order. It's also a heartbreaking melodrama that runs on the real-life chemistry between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

A camp melodrama if ever there was one, its opulent gaudiness and the unimpeachable craftsmanship of its production design now more than ever keep the eye enthralled through even the more plodding longeurs of its 243 minute running time.

Whatever the original aim, the film that survives is most vividly a kitschy fashion show as well as a knowing fusion of two common enough sexual fantasies—of powerfully alpha queens decked out in inviting Egyptian regalia and of a young Elizabeth Taylor in just about anything.