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Intolerance

Play trailer 2:07 Poster for Intolerance 1916,  2h 58m,  Drama Play Trailer Watchlist
Intolerance: Trailer 1 Intolerance: Trailer 1 Now Playing View more videos
Watchlist 98% 42 Reviews Tomatometer 77% 2,500+ Ratings Popcornmeter
98% Tomatometer 42 Reviews 77% Popcornmeter 2,500+ Ratings
D.W. Griffith's epic intercuts between four separate stories about man's inhumanity to man. In Babylon, pacifist Prince Belshazzar is brought down by warring religious factions. In Judea, the last days of Christ are depicted in the style of a Passion play. Meanwhile in France, Catherine de Medici presides over the slaughter of the Huguenots. And in California, a woman pleads for the life of her husband when he is sentenced to hang for a murder he did not commit.
Intolerance

What to Know

Critics Consensus

A pioneering classic and one of the most influential films ever made, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance stands as the crowning jewel in an incredible filmography.

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Critics Reviews

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Pauline Kael The New Yorker Feb 5, 2024
The movie is the greatest extravaganza and the greatest folly in movie history, an epic celebration of the potentialities of the new medium -- lyrical, passionate, and grandiose. Go to Full Review
Harry Carr Los Angeles Times Mar 24, 2019
As a medium for expressing art, moving pictures may not stand the test of time, but Intolerance is greater than any medium. It is one of the mileposts on the long road of art. Go to Full Review
Michael Atkinson Village Voice May 9, 2014
All at once the Moloch of cineastical good intentions, the first great juggernaut of auteur ambition, and the largest experimental film ever made. Go to Full Review
Tony Sloman Radio Times Jul 31, 2024
5/5
This is one of the most satisfying films ever made; timeless and still stunning in its revolutionary and assured use of the medium. Go to Full Review
Zita Short InSession Film Feb 3, 2023
B
This will likely always place highly on lists of the greatest films of all time. Go to Full Review
Harry Ennis New York Clipper Nov 13, 2020
Intolerance is stupendous, it's great, marvelous inspiring, and everything else good you can think of in the category of descriptive adjectives. Go to Full Review
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Audience Reviews

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Jan 26, 2019 The best, GREATEST thrilling epic movie ever made!
Theodore S Jan 12, 2019 Early pioneering masterpiece of cinema!
Leia M Jan 10, 2019 Intolerance bored and irritated the audiences of the time. They were right, and the critics are wrong. This is not a good film, even if there are some interesting ideas. It has claims to be a bad one. Intolerance was certainly influential. Griffith pioneered a range of techniques that were widely imitated later. He likes spectacle: there are horses, cars, trains, chases, a gunfight, the walls of Babylon, portrait shots of pretty girls, a riot and a massive battle. Other directors saw what could be done, realised that Griffith had a wonderful box of tricks, and thought they could do it better. If you want to see what came out of it, you need look no further than the work of Cecil B DeMille. The root of the film's problems lie in the lack of either human interest or a dramatic narrative. A movie doesn't need to tell people what to think; it can show them instead. Where Charlie Chaplin won our sympathy through demonstrative actions, Griffith instructs us. He tells us whose side we ought to be on. He gives his puppets epithets instead of names, like the 'Dear Loved One' because that's what we're supposed to make of them. If the charitable women are being officious, there is no evidence of this until very late on. Griffith isn't interested in people, and it shows. There are no personalities. If there is any emotion to be found, it depends on what we, as an audience, bring with us. The lack of a narrative is compounded by the incoherence of the design. Cross-cutting four sequences sounds like a promising idea. It might have worked if the sequences - like, say, the different plots in Traffic - had some relationship to each other. Unfortunately, these don't - saying they're about 'intolerance' is about as helpful as saying that War and Peace is about 'history' If the film drags, it's not just that it's long and slow by contemporary standards; it's that the spectacle isn't enough to hold our attention. The result is not so much a group of stories, more a magic lantern show. It is a moving picture rather than a movie. See more
Nov 5, 2018 One of the most impressive silent films ever made.
Leia S May 23, 2018 "Birth Of A Nation" was D.W. Griffith's "Jaws", because it not only wowed the audiences of the time, but it also changed practically every film that came after it. How to possibly top that? Griffith, mindful that some were labeling his "Birth Of A Nation" insights as racist, chose to intertwine four stories, each with a similar moral underpinning: that cowardly, liberal do-gooders are ruining what's good with the world. Regardless of his populist politics here is a mammoth achievement of storytelling, particularly the Babylonian segment, that changed filmmaking forevermore and made it what we know it as today. And that's the reason to see it. Well, that and Griffith's trademark race to the finish flourishes. See more
Anakin R Apr 3, 2018 I can see why as a film its so well loved but, I will forever see this movie as three hours of my life i will never get back.
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Intolerance

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Movie Info

Synopsis D.W. Griffith's epic intercuts between four separate stories about man's inhumanity to man. In Babylon, pacifist Prince Belshazzar is brought down by warring religious factions. In Judea, the last days of Christ are depicted in the style of a Passion play. Meanwhile in France, Catherine de Medici presides over the slaughter of the Huguenots. And in California, a woman pleads for the life of her husband when he is sentenced to hang for a murder he did not commit.
Director
D.W. Griffith
Producer
D.W. Griffith
Screenwriter
D.W. Griffith, Tod Browning, Anita Loos
Distributor
Triangle Film Corporation
Production Co
Triangle Film Corporation
Genre
Drama
Release Date (Theaters)
Sep 5, 1916, Wide
Release Date (Streaming)
Aug 11, 2016
Runtime
2h 58m
Aspect Ratio
Academy (1.33:1)
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