Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

GarnettTeenage The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

ofpsmith On one hand I see how popularity of this film is warranted. Made by legendary Russian director Sergei Eisenstein for Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, Ivan the Terrible is a biopic of Ivan of Moscow, the first Tsar of Russia. Acting is all good and I certainly think it's a compelling enough view, but my issue is that the film seems very drawn out. It's about an hour and a half but there are maybe five scenes. I'm exaggerating, I know, but it's what it felt like to me. Each scene takes a while and like I said, it feels very drawn out. I don't mean to say that the film is devoid of several very positive aspects. The sets are amazing as is the acting. But in complete fairness I think Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) was a better biopic.

framptonhollis Although the few talkies Eisenstein made are often noted as being much different than his silent, I did find many traces of Eisenstein's trademark visual style all throughout this masterpiece. Brief flickers of genius, artistic filmmaking were present multiple times, and much of it felt like a silent film with words (if THAT makes any sense). Eisenstein was no doubt an extremely visual filmmaking, and although his few talkies certainly DO have a lot of talking, sometimes their visuals convey even more.Various images sprinkled throughout this film shall likely remain in my cinematic memory for years to come. Ivan's haunting shadow looming behind him in an almost ghostly manner, the many close ups of Ivan, showing off actor Nikolay Cherkasov's bizarrely creepy and unique face. These Gothic images tell a story of conflict and pain that is at times relentlessly dark and tragic. This is a powerful and haunting epic, a film injected with an indescribable real-yet-somehow-surreal type atmosphere, and the same mood as a German Expressionist horror film crossed with a David Lean blockbuster

OldAle1 Eisenstein's devotees seem to be split into two camps: those who prefer his earlier, silent, more formalistic exercises like Potemkin and those who are more partial to the later sound films. Though I haven't yet seen Alexander Nevsky, my recent first viewing of the wartime Ivan will probably put me firmly in the second category. Much as I admire and respect his early works, no Eisenstein viewing up until now has hit me with the sheer joy of the form, storytelling and acting like this 2-part masterpiece made amazingly enough in the latter part of World War II. It's really quite astonishing that a large budget spectacle like this could have been conceived and executed so well in a country besieged....as the French Children of Paradise is in some ways a national epic given more gravity by the circumstances of its birth, so too we cannot help but look at Ivan as an exercise in the national will -- or at least Stalin's.And certainly in Part I there is much to make the mad leader proud. Ivan is willful, prone to snap decisions, but cunning and charismatic, a born ruler it seems. This first film mostly deals with Ivan's consolidation of power, with the courting of allies -- and his wife-to-be Alexandra and the crushing of enemies, most notably in the exciting siege of Kazan, where Ivan himself comes up with the idea to fill tunnels under the city with gunpowder, and where he shows a compassionate side -- not to be seen often, though not insignificant -- in reprimanding his commander Kurbsky for unnecessary brutality. We also see the power wielded by the Tsar's aunt Efrosina who is in most respects the central antagonist of both films, as she plots to have her own son on the throne while Ivan lies sick. At the end, Ivan loses both his wife and his power, leaving Moscow and vowing only to return when the people want him to.The storytelling is fluid and exciting and I had little trouble following the many plot strands despite a limited knowledge of 16th century Russian history; a big part of Eisenstein's genius in these films is in his (as always) extraordinary rhythmic editing and in an obsessive attention to detail that rivals anything seen in the cinema before or since. Every shot is suffused with poetry and meaning...the religious imagery everywhere, the animalistic symbolism embodied in Ivan (the hawk), Efrosina (the snake) and other characters, the regular movement from claustrophobia both physical and of the mind to open and huge spaces....this is both one of the most beautiful and overstuffed, sumptuous films ever made. My poor description isn't going to be up to the task; and I haven't yet even mentioned the acting, which is certainly theatrical and over-the-top in some ways, but in the best Orson Welles sense of that phrase. Indeed, of all actors only Welles to my mind could have competed with Nikolia Cherkassov in the central role of Ivan; and of all directors beside Eisenstein perhaps only Welles could have managed to weld the artifices of film, theater, pantomime and music together so organically. That music -- by then-rehabilitated Dmitri Shostakovich -- is powerful as well, though to my mind not as memorable as Prokofiev's work on Nevsky though I usually valued the former composer more highly; it's great music but it rarely comes to the forefront -- perhaps it just doesn't need to, with so many other elements competing with it in the vast filled-up canvas of the film.The Criterion DVD showcases an absolutely superb print of the film, indeed it is one of the best-looking, best-preserved films of the period I have ever seen, razor sharp and crystal clear and clean. I didn't have time to go through all of the extras as I was just renting it but rest assured I will when I eventually buy it. This is one of half-dozen most powerful experiences I've had watching something at home, a classic that more than lives up to its high reputation.

jmmartin-5 I know "Ten Best" lists are an exercise in futility since aesthetics are a subjective matter and no one can lay claim to knowing what is best, only what one likes. If the rating system at IMDb had eleven stars, I would award them to this one which, taken together with Part II, would be my all-time favorite film. (As one reviewer already has noted, one cannot truly appreciate what Eisenstein was up to unless one sees both Parts I and II, preferably back to back.) When I was studying film at UCLA, I had to do a term paper in a seminar on film aesthetics and I did it on these two movies. My title was, "Eisenstein's *Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II: The Perfect Union of Form and Content." I tried to show how Eisenstein created a movie masterpiece by telling a story that works on three different levels: historical, satirical, and autobiographical. The two films (some work was done on a third part, but Eisenstein died of a heart attack before completing it, and in any case, the release of Part II was held up for decades once Stalin had caught on to the film's subtext) only superficially deal with the historical Ivan Grozny (in Russian, the meaning is more "awe-inspiring" or "formidable" than the English "terrible"). In fact, Eisenstein's Ivan is revisionist in the extreme, in part because he wanted to present a heroic figure who unites the Russian people against outside foes (in the movie, the Poles; in Eisenstein's time, Nazi Germany -- in fact, filming in Moscow had to be halted for a time so that production could be relocated to the resort town of Alma Atta). But as Ivan becomes more paranoid following the poisoning of the Czarina, Anastasia, at the hands of the patrician Boyars, he resorts to murderous plotting and counter-plotting, which Eisenstein uses as a metaphor for Stalinist pogroms against anyone "crazy" enough to question his reign. (Remember, if you spoke out against Stalin, you committed suicide by being thrown out of windows by the KGB, and those who escaped this fate wound up in Siberian slavery.) The third level on which the films operate, the autobiographical, presents Eisenstein as Ivan (hinted at by biographer Marie Seton when she included a photo of the director sitting in the Czar's actual chair, his feet dangling just like a shot in the film of the young Ivan during his regency). Eisenstein told Seton he had homosexual tendencies but that he thought homosexuality a "dead end." Of course, in Stalinist Russia, being homosexual was tantamount to being insane -- or traitorous. Eisenstein's movies are full of homosexual imagery, and *Ivan* is no exception. The Oprichniki, for example, Ivan's iron guard of loyal, KGB-like attendants, is depicted as a kind of samurai mafia which at times (e.g. the drunken banquet toward the end of Part II) seems definitely gay. That sequence includes a telling song and dance number by a pretty young Oprichnik who hides behind a female face-mask. In the same sequence, the Czar's drunken nephew, an effeminate young man, is dressed in the royal robes and sent into a cathedral where a Boyar assassin, thinking it is Ivan, stabs him to death. Although the Oprichniks want to kill the assassin, Ivan says to let him go, "for he has killed the Czar's worst enemy." In other words, they've murdered Eisenstein's own perceived weakness: his closeted homosexuality. The movie is full of such insights, and I can't think of a single other film that is so multi-layered. Once you begin looking for these things, you'll want to watch *Ivan* over and over again.