Critics reviews

[Scorsese] was rewarded with an extraordinary performance. There’s not a trace of solicitousness in Dafoe’s portrayal of Jesus. Dafoe honors Nikos Kazantzakis’s source novel, which envisioned a more “human” version of Western religion’s most exalted deity.

Pointedly employing the full arsenal of film grammar and drawing from the whole expanse of film history, Scorsese restores Christianity's diffuse, often unrecognizable remnants to their origin.

If the nightmares of Paperhouse sent chills up my young spine that persist to this day, the dreams of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ rocked me to my core in a way that I will never be able to shake... The Last Temptation of Christ is one of the most spiritually transcendent films ever made, and the one that has brought me closer to understanding the power of religion than any other movie.

Let's not pretend this movie isn't blasphemous. It clearly is. (Fine by me, since as far as I'm concerned it replaces one largely made-up story with another, far more compelling one.) Protesters who hadn't seen it and got worked up about Jesus boning Mary Magdalene were misplacing their proxy wrath—the real fuck-you to true believers occurs later in the temptation, when Paul tells Jesus that it doesn't matter whether or not he died and was resurrected, so long as people believe that he did/was.

That the film remains consistently engaging can be attributed equally to Scorsese's characteristically bold direction, longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker's distinctive editing, often cutting on rapid movement like a fast zoom or snap pan, Michael Ballhaus's earthy cinematography, and Peter Gabriel's plaintive, haunting score.

The result, as Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, is "a religious film informed by some of the cadences, intonations, and attitudes of [modern] New York." This is a singular combination, and certainly not for religious purists; but as an attempt to dramatize a private response to religious subject matter, it is often as daring as the crucifixion sequence of ANDREI RUBLEV.

The theology in Last Temptation is the essence of what is, after all, a film continually engaged with matters of spirituality, with the contrast between corporeality and the spiritual plane, with the ways in which spiritual messages are twisted and misunderstood by those who hear them. Scorsese's Last Temptation is a sustained examination of the meaning of Jesus' life and death, and of his messages.

It's a film that's not just about "the meaning of Jesus' life and death, and of his messages," but about what it means to wrestle with that man, with God and with those man/God messages. It's a film about religion that's deeply human and very personal.

The film is merely a vivid, strident, intellectually curious work. It is also possibly Scorsese's greatest film—not that it's ever likely to win that consensus from a popular culture that has made a fetish of Taxi Driver or Goodfellas—and one of the most vigorous and original religious films ever made.

This is a more naked, personal film than any of the director's other works, including the macho soul-search of Raging Bull.

Ironically, it was a very devout film that would appeal more to believers than atheists. Since I belong to the later category, I find The Last Temptation of Christ entirely too reverential.

It is without a doubt Scorsese's least entertaining film – Kundun and The Age of Innocence are unmitigated laugh-fests in comparison. It is, however, clearly the most personal (as he has stated) of all his movies, and the power wrought by the intimate feeling of watching a Jesus Christ film made by a man of great faith is enough to make it worth watching.