[Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo is the most serious, sober, and] deeply reverent film about Christ the cinema has given us. And yet, in a way, these are negative qualities: their presence does not necessarily mean that the director has come to terms with the central problems of his subject. It is not frivolous to say that the story has no suspense (everyone knows how it turns out); this is a problem in any dramatic representation of the life of Christ—the more so since it is all too easy to rely exclusively on the emotions that inevitably color it in the spectators' minds, instead of trying to make some positive contribution. It would not be fair to say that Pasolini has done this, but the film sometimes looks perilously like it…. The film is at times pictorially beautiful, and the nonprofessional players act with striking restraint: it is...