William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice: Critic Reviews

Despite some clunky exposition and rote iambic line readings, it attains a bona fide Shakespearean vibrance.

Shakespeare's most problematic play at least with respect to modern sensitivities receives an intelligent interpretation from Michael Radford and a superb cast.

Worth seeing for its lovely Venetian settings and evocative score but most of all for Pacino's spectacular rendering of Shylock.

For lovers of the play's language ... the losses will hurt. But as cinematic storytelling, it works.

[Al Pacino's] terrific to watch and listen to; you can't take your eyes off him.

Pacino takes Shylock, perhaps the most insistent and troubling character in all of Shakespeare, and roots him powerfully to the ground.

Even notwithstanding this version's inert blocking and awkward camera placements, The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's more crooked and hollow contraptions in any guise.

A queasy comedy in which Pacino burns a hole in the screen while the frivolity around him sputters.

Ranks as one of the most powerful recent adaptations of the bard's work.

The Merchant of Venice is a problematic play, but Michael Radford's new movie version passes most of the cinematic Shakespeare tests with flying colors.

Balanced, beguiling -- even funny.

To quote the touching words of one correspondent, posted during an online discussion of this movie, 'I didn't like the story.' Not much to be done about that.

Shylock is an intense, passionate character in a great play, and Radford's film does them justice.

An important, timeless and sometimes troublesome classic has been filmed successfully and at long last.

In what is, unbelievably, the first English-language film of Merchant since the silent era, Collins and Pacino plumb the depths of acting, of Shakespeare, of the difference between law and justice.

The give-and-take between the two veterans [Pacino and Irons] is a delight to witness.

Pacino's stentorian delivery and punctuating hands are almost parodistic, as likely to draw a chuckle as to elicit empathy.

Radford has rendered off the comedy to find the dramatic skeleton underneath. It is an approach that works stunningly well and is perhaps the only way the play can now be done.

Promises more than it delivers.

Pacino is at least dynamic, something harder to say about the women in the cast.

An uneasy blend of tragedy, comedy and anti-Semitism.

A vivid, engrossing and defensible Shakespeare adaptation, a period piece that truly has a feel for a time long past -- and a place and attitude that are not.

Were it not for the stain of anti-Semitism that forever marks Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, there is little doubt that Michael Radford's brave screen adaptation would currently be in serious contention for awards.

A lean, stripped-down and unapologetically cinematic take on Shakespeare's work, an adaptation designed at each turn to diminish the mechanics of the comedy and to explore the depths of the pathos.

Radford doesn't solve the problems of The Merchant of Venice, which nowadays is too disturbing to be played for comedy and too unresolved to qualify as tragedy or even that ever-shifting hybrid, tragicomedy.