Metacritic reviews

1900 is a marvelous movie, Bertolucci is one of the best directors who has ever lived.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s film is a living, fluid organism that spans the distances between several poles of extremity.

The story is almost too small for Bertolucci's sprawling approach, and the ungainliness of his international cast stifles both the dialogue and the performances.

Even in the full-length Italian version, 1900 is too emotionally extravagant ever to be considered a masterpiece. Rather, it’s a monumental achievement like such original and impassioned but scarcely flawless screen epics as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Abel Gance’s Napoleon.

Some scenes are banal and offensively simpleminded. But patience, ultimately, is rewarded with a welter of detail and some mighty fine camerawork.

Bertolucci’s ambitious generational canvas is elaborately constructed.

Bertolucci can direct great set pieces, of course, and some of his biggest scenes (like the outdoor dances that are his favorites) are spectacular. But he needs well-defined characters to anchor his stories, and he seems more confident when he drills into their psyches instead of spreading himself all over the ideological map.

Like a delicious pasta salad, ruined with intermittent slabs of Velveeta cheese.

It's a shapeless mass of film stock containing some brilliant moments and a lot more that are singularly uninspired.

Whether one takes the two-part movie as a glamorous epic or as a lengthy advertisement for the Italian communist party, it still looks like a major catastrophe.