Movieo
Poster for The Sicilian

The Sicilian

In Sicily, you stand by the law or by the Mafia. Only one man ever dared to stand alone.

1987 · 1h 56m · R Crime, Drama, Thriller
Directed by Michael Cimino

Seen it?

Overview

Egocentric bandit Salvatore Guiliano fights the Church, the Mafia, and the landed gentry while leading a populist movement for Sicilian independence.

Director and cast

Critics on Rotten Tomatoes

Top critics, in their words

All reviews
13%
Tomatometer
Rotten

The Sicilian represents a botched telling of the life of postwar outlaw leader Salvatore Giuliano.

Variety Staff, Variety
Rotten

The dialogue is ponderously poetic, stilted and over-emphatic, characters are convenient cyphers, and both cutting and photography tend towards the bombastic. Folly, then, but gloriously inept and overblown.

Geoff Andrew, Time Out
Rotten

The film is a mess, though hardly on the panoramic scale of Heaven's Gate.

Vincent Canby, New York Times
Rotten

One of this film's big problems is that you can hardly see it. The foregrounds are dark and indistinct. The backgrounds are overlit and washed-out.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Rotten

The Sicilian is unambiguously atrocious, but in that very special, howlingly grandiose manner that only a filmmaker with visions of epic greatness working on a large scale with a multinational cast can achieve.

Hal Hinson, Washington Post

Comments

Talk about the film with other members

More films