You won't be disappointed!

Just perfect...

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

I saw this at the Palm Springs Film Festival and was blown away! As soon as the movie began, I could tell it was a movie that I should pay attention.The plot is a performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by a group of real-life prisoners in an Italian prison. I loved how the prisoners could relate to the play by seeing the parallels in their own lives--the power lust, deceit and betrayal. The more the prisoners understood the play, the more they became immersed in their roles.There have been many attempts to make Shakespeare palatable to the modern audience. This was my favorite iteration because it showed the actors trying to understand it, just as an audience might try to find the relevance. As a high school student, I found Shakespeare and Roman History boring. It wasn't until I hit my 40s did I realize this history was more violent than the Sopranos.I don't know if this movie has ever been widely released. I highly recommend seeing it if it ever comes to your town.

The film struck a queer tone that was hard to pin down at first: modest but deceptively so, economic in its time and almost elliptic but yet not quite so, with chunks of life jumping into the rehearsals in an amateur, tongue in cheek, failed way - was this the point? What were the directors trying to do with this film? For as a paradigm of condemning power or exposing with the jarring effect art has the discontents of power this does not work.So what to do with this film? I think the Taviani bros knowingly or not took Six Characters in Search of an Author and turned it into some kind of Six Sentenced Men in Search of an Other, taking Pirandello's theatricality and sophistry and by pushing it to the extreme, to an alienating, subversive context, this would turn the black glove inside out stark white like in the superb cinematography. It is as if Pirandello and Brecht meet: we have the right amount of what was once called 'alienation' and the Pirandellian both sides of the argument, but this is unworkable. It makes irony or simplicity forced and in the very end the "discovery of art that turns the room into a prison" makes for sloppy humanism instead of pungent, elusive and political irony. In a perpetual state of emergency, when remembering the pure, ideological category of - ah! - life before, or after, or now, this turns you into a bad actor and not simply an amateur one as the film showcases.

Perhaps its the beautiful rolling sound of the Italian dialogue telling the story of Julius Cesar that made this enjoyable at least to the auditory sense. Perhaps it was that the language was sometimes amended to be more modern and meaningful. Perhaps it was the explained parallels of some of the prisoners experiences that helped to make the context more understandable. No matter, it was a thoroughly great way to start the Sydney Film Festival. The fact that this was a script within a script set in a prison using some real life prisoners didn't detract from anything in this film for me - I go to the cinema generally looking for a story, a fabrication, an unreality dressed in reality. I liked the gritty black and white, the sub-line of the prison life and setting. Yes, perhaps a prisoner saying he now felt caged etc didn't have to be said because it was obvious, but all in all a very enjoyable watch. I was engaged and participating from beginning to end. For me, one of the better versions of Julius/Shakespeare and a nice twist on an old but everlasting story.

I saw the world premiere of this movie at the Berlinale, where it won the golden bear last night. The movie is not bad, but also not special. The basic idea -real prison inmates play Shakespeares "Julius Caerar"- makes the movie interesting and the impressive acting makes you often forget, what fate those men face and what brought them to prison (murder, mafia-crimes etc). But since you know all that from the promotion already, the movie sometimes just leads up to watching an old Shakespeare-play, which we also already know. Just some philosophic aspects (at the end) and the idea of not showing the actual play, but the criminals only practicing it most of the time, is very entertaining.