Pier Paolo Pasolini's very free, very barbaric "Medea," which is less an adaptation of the Euripides play than an interpretation of it, is not completely successful, but it is … full of eccentric imagination and real passion….

If your priorities are such, Pasolini's "Medea" can be an excellent argument for the kind of literal movie made by [Michael] Cacoyannis….

"Medea" is something else entirely. Pasolini has the monumental and marvelous presumption to put himself ahead of Euripides (who was not, after all, a moviemaker), in an attempt to translate into film terms the sense of a prehistoric time, place and intelligence in which all myths and rituals were real experiences….

Pasolini's Medea is no longer a rather ill-tempered woman spurned, an early Women's Liberationist, a mother guilty of the sort of murders that were … appalling to the ancient Greeks….

In Pasolini's conception, Medea is a primeval soul who erupts...