While I can tolerate Tim Allen at times in other films, he is helped here immensely by Sigourney Weaver (who must be very grateful to meet aliens who are not trying to implant embryos in her chest) and Alan Rickman as the classically-trained British actor who barely puts up with his makeup. This was one of the most purely enjoyable films I've seen in a while.

The effect was rather like sucking on an unripe persimmon.

Some highlights (so to speak):

Gidget and Moondoggy surrounded by Roman youths. I was expecting something like the revelation flashback from SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER.  Instead, the toughs of the Tiber pull out musical instruments and Moondoggy begins a serenade! (BTW, who ever thought of casting Tony Curtis-wannabee Darren as a Californian called "Moondoggy"? Darren makes a great hologram on DEEP SPACE 9, but as flesh and blood he leaves something to be desired.)

Cesare Danova plays an older Roman with whom Gidget becomes infatuated for his continental smoothness, but before you start muttering "Humbert Humbert," rest assured that from the start we know that it's all harmless. He's just a friend of her father's keeping an eye on her.

Moondoggy falls for his young Italian docent (Danielle de Metz) in a plot that is both utterly predictable and totally incomprehensible--no mean feat!

The high point of the film was watching the kids and Jesse Royce Landis twisting the night away at a nightclub in the Forum.  Eeeeew!

This is the opening of GLADIATOR, Ridley Scott's proof that the historical epic is not dead. The story as history, of course, is a good part pure hooey. Maximus is asked by the dying emperor to take the throne and restore Rome to its former republican glory, with the Senate ruling. Before Maximus can even decide, though, the emperor has been hurried to his death by his jealous son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), and the favorite general now finds himself the next target of Commodus' wrath. Barely escaping death, Maximus discovers that his family his been murdered on the new emperor's command. Weakened and anonymous, he is captured and sold to a former gladiator (Oliver Reed) who now trains gladiators in far-off provinces that have avoided the ban imposed by Aurelius, eagerly greeting the new emperor's revival of the sport . Maximus, known only as "The Spaniard," demonstrates his skill and bides his time, waiting only for the chance for revenge.

Maximus, of course, is as fictional as the notion that imperial Rome could ever have been a model for democracy. As emperor, Commodus did indeed engage in combat in the arena himself, which with the loaves of bread he handed out at these circuses made him the darling of the Roman mob. But he died in his bath at the hands of an assassin, after more than a decade of megalomaniacal rule. GLADIATOR attempts to be no truer to history than, say, BEN-HUR or SPARTACUS or BRAVEHEART, and the characters and conflicts put us on familiar genre ground. But given that limit, GLADIATOR proves to be at least as good as the best of this type.

One of the film's strengths is, ironically, in its script. If the previews have suggested that we will be plunged into the blood and terror of the Coliseum immediately, we find that we will have to wait. Patiently and deliberately, the story is built over time, characters and their nuances being detailed, relationships explored, context being developed, so that by the time the action shifts to Rome, we are well-prepared for the rest of the developments. Crowe has an absolute assurance in his role, playing again on the combinations of power and vulnerability that he exposed in LA CONFIDENTIAL and THE INSIDER, but in a different mix. Phoenix--looking remarkably like Rufus Sewell--handles a difficult part well, at times almost evoking sympathy for this tyrant. And Richard Harris and Reed (who died during the filming) approach their characters with the assurance of seasoned professionals (but what drinking stories did they tell each other!). Connie Nielsen, as Commodus' sister and Maximus' former lover, brings complexity to the kind of woman's role that too easily slips into either victim or villain in such films.

But let's be clear. The appeal of the historical epic is not in its truthfulness to history or in the depth of its psychology. It is in spectacle--a reimagining of the past as it might have, should have existed. And it is spectacle that is GLADIATOR's triumphant virtue.  Take that opening battle scene in Germania. The German attack and Roman counter-attack are displayed with the clarity and precision that were the best (maybe only?) virtues of BRAVEHEART. The action alternates from the middle shots of archers and cavalry to close-in framings of the hackwork of sword and battle-axe to sweeping and dispassionate pans of the burning field of battle, shots that invite comparison with the battle scenes of Griffith and of Gance.

Small and large motifs help to give the film weight and structure. Anthony Lane, in his NEW YORKER review of the film, has already noted that the opening explanatory titles are taken straight from Anthony Man's FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, which opened in the same setting. When the gladiators first enter the Coliseum, Hans Zimmer's score slyly works in a few bars from the "Mars" section of Holst's THE PLANETS. Falling snow, dripping blood, and strewn rose petals link scene to scene. And most dazzling of all is the digital re-creation of the Glory that was Rome. Washed in golden light, the clouds and sun above the Forum and the Tiber are a literal evocation of the notion of Rome as something more than place--a vision of a city that is the definition of civilization itself. The light and colors, fittingly, come straight out of the fantastic visions of Hudson River painter Thomas Cole, like his canvas THE CONSUMMATION.

Reminiscent of JANE EYRE, the film tries to convey the isolation of a young woman far away from home in a cold, forbidding country. She has changed her name and tried to hide her Jewishness, although mealtimes and Sundays are an ordeal in this religious, Victorian family.  Mother is deeply repressed. Father is always busy working with the new process of photography. The young daughter Rosina is to tutor is a brat, but the governess's brashness wins the child over, leaving her time to help the father in his lab. Master and apprentice grow closer and become lovers, to the delight of the latter and shame of the former.

Driver is as energetic and winning as usual in her role. The unhappy mother played by Harriet Walter (Peter Whimsey's Harriet Vane on TV and Fanny Dashwood in SENSE AND SENSIBILITY) seems so tightly wound that you fear she'll fly apart, and Tom Wilkinson (of THE FULL MONTY and SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE) continues to prove he's one of the most underrated actors around as he tries to deal with his lust and his guilt. However, the problem for the film is that by the second half, it has changed course. Rosina's Jewishness turns out to be merely a distraction from a film about sexuality and sex roles. As a result, some issues are left unresolved while the resolutions of the ending seem too neat to be convincing.

                                    --Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Spanish guitar and castanets. A screen drenched in blood-red. The guts and severed head of a bull. The bull's carcass dragged and hung in a grotesque parody of crucifixion. The carcass becomes a face.  The face is of the old and exiled Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Francisco Rabal), once court painter to the royal family of Spain, transformed despite himself into one of art's great visionaries, now a man who has lived too long and seen too much. The old man's scarred and battered, bull-like face, surmounted by a halo of thin white hair, testifies to suffering and longing. As the old painter works on his last drawings, "The Bulls of Bordeaux," sparring with his wife and daughters over his medical care, he slips in and out of dreams, memories and fantasies of his life, his loves and the horrors he has seen.

The young Goya (Jose Coronado) was an ambitious social climber, lover of the Duchess of Alba, the subject of his infamous "Clothed Maja/Naked Maja" (which showed her dressed or nude depending on the angle of the light). Her formal portrait shows her pointing to the ground below her feet, where she testifies to the love affair written in the dirt, "Solo Goya"--"Only Goya." But Goya was also a believer in liberalism and progress. His portraits of his patrons, the King and Queen of Spain, are scathing indictments of stupidity, cruelty, and vanity. It is a miracle that he ever got away with them. Napoleon and the ideals of the French Revolution seemed to promise relief, but when Goya saw the atrocities brought by the French troops, he had to record the reality of what his hope had come to. Ferlinghetti's poem is all too accurate a description.

Carlos Saura, himself the Grand Old Man of Spanish film, is used to portraying art and passion. GOYA IN BORDEAUX has some of the same artificiality and theatricality that marked his dance trilogy, BLOOD WEDDING, CARMEN and EL AMOR BRUJO. But the artifice is all at the service of the emotion, both of the painter's life and of his subjects. In a story that seems like a fevered dream, the film shows why Goya, nearly 200 years gone, is the most contemporary of artists