Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

TheNabOwnzz For some reason 'El Cid' is not as well known among the 'Epic' genre of film like Ben-Hur or Lawrence of Arabia, but this does not deter it from its quality. It is one of the greatest of its kind, an epic story about a man who becomes a hero and later legend.It is a simply sensational motion picture that manages to create every shot in such an artistic way that every single frame becomes fascinating. Indoor scenes have beautiful scenery and are lit incredibly well. Outdoor scenes ( It was mostly actually filmed in Spain where it took place ) are visually just incredible due to the angles Anthony Mann gives us. There are frequent scenes with loads of extra's on horses during these outdoor scenes and these are always a joy to look at due to their natural movements and the beautiful Spanish landscapes with great angles in the background. Battle scenes are so massive in scale, but filmed with such skill that it immerses you into the film. The overview during battles is simply incredible as we can always see what our main characters are doing, and combined with a couple of excellent one on one fights early on in the film, it is a masterpiece of choreography too.Miklos Rozsa's score is a simply brilliant orchestral piece which always seems like a perfect fit for a film of this kind. ( Also composed the incredible score for Ben-Hur ) Charlton Heston & Sophia Loren who play man and wife reportedly did not get along well during filming, yet their performance does not seem to suffer from this, and is enhanced a significant amount by Miklos Rozsa's amazing emotional score. Heston seems born to play these kind of roles in movie epics, and his performance and screen presence are once again an incredible sight to behold. Loren could have shown more emotion in a couple of scenes, yet due to their seemingly quite natural relationship in the film and her facial acting being pretty good this is just a slight defect. I do wish they visibly aged or changed Loren's look due to some circumstances that happen in the film though, it was a bit too out of character for her to look like porcelain all the way through. It is a film filled with beautiful scenes, and not a mediocre one among them. Whether it be beautiful outdoor scenery with epic landscape shots and massive moving extra's on the screen or beautiful indoor scenes with beautiful cinematography it is a film that manages to perform on a high level on a consistent basis throughout the film. Without spoiling anything, the final scene is just cinematic perfection where all points and everything that has happened before seemingly come together. It uses tragic events or reunions between established characters and Rozsa's score to create emotion, and a motion picture full of emotion it has become.With beautiful natural cinematography, excellent acting, a both triumphant and emotionally powerful score by Miklos Rozsa, beautifully staged battle scenes with great editing to create a good overview of the situation our characters are in, and a great central message about how one turns into a legend by leading his people to victory, El Cid is an incredible experience and should be considered as one of the greatest 'Epic' films ever made.

hou-3 I'm a medieval historian by profession and I think the feelings of most medievalists about El Cid are bound to be mixed. Of course it's a terrific epic and they make effective use of medieval locations - Peniscola, standing in for Valencia, looks sensational. There's also some excellent, genuinely late 11th-c stone sculpture and bronze doors. But the clothing and armour are late medieval and the depiction of attitudes, whether religious or political, is sadly all over the place. War lord, made a few years later and also starring Heston, gets much closer to the real eleventh century than El Cid manages to do. Quite apart from authenticity, my feelings are ambivalent. The music is gorgeous and the battle scenes - all done with real people - are exciting. But the love story draaags and the plot line is too discursive. Also, El Cid himself just doesn't seem real. The shape of his career is never explained properly. Curiously enough, a much more realistic film could be made in these more cynical times about the adventurer/mercenary soldier that the Cid actually was. It would be a good film too! But it would be very different from this classic, and the thousands of extras wouldn't be there. At the end of the day I can forgive the longeurs of the film for two standout moments that never fail to thrill: the opening of the barn door and the moving acclaim the Cid gets from the hundreds of followers who have been waiting silently for him to appear, and of course the unforgettable last minutes.

Armand more than a classic , it is a beautiful film.that is its secret and basic virtue. a film about fundamental values more than image of a hero. and it is a precise lesson about making of a epic movie. not only for good performance, atmosphere, dialogs or fight scenes but for its special poetry who makes it different by another blockbusters of period. the theme is delicate - a national symbol and the Hollywood recipes is too clear. but in this case, a splendid puzzle appears. and the work of entire team, especially of Charlton Heston, makes each part to be almost perfect. it is not Ben Hur or Cleopatra. the ingredients seems be the same but it is only impression of first sigh. it is itself, after decades, after trends and evolution of artistic taste. so, a beautiful movie. love story, heroic scenes, delicate nuances. and something more. a secret ingredient. or, only, the shadow of a knight.

Rueiro This is one of the best epic super-productions of all time, with a beautiful cinematography, a majestic score and a solid and dynamic direction. Still many people have put it down as a folly with no real depth or substance, and others for its historical inaccuracy. Yes, it is not one hundred per cent historically accurate, but then, how much do we really know about an 11th century warrior when very few written documents of the era survive today? We only have a few of the old cantigas (poems to be sung) and the Poema de Mio Cid at the Spanish national archives. Many Spaniards tend to put this great film down only because it was made by a bunch of American and Italian "philistines" with no knowledge of the legend at all but for the only purpose of creating an epic to rival with "Ben-Hur" and "Spartacus". That is a childish way to see it. At least we should be grateful that someone came up and took the challenge of making such a film in the first place. That man was Samuel Bronston. This self-made movie mogul not only had the confidence and charm to persuade other people to lend him huge sums of money but he also got Franco's ultra-Catholic fascist regime to approve the making of a film about their national hero where the main character was to be played by a foreigner who was also a Protestant. Of course, Bronston succeeded easily through bribery in a corrupt country, as well as through the willingness of Franco to allow American business to settle in Spain and help revive its obsolete economy. Franco would use "El Cid" to promote Spain around the world as a touristic destination during the Sixties. Bronston wanted to make an unique epic, a high quality production with sheer spectacle and credited with some historical veracity. So he hired the best people he could think of: cinematographer Robert Krasker, who used the radical and innovative Technirama70 format that magnified the endless open spaces of the Spanish plateaus, Miklos Rozsa for the score -his last great triumph, which should have won him another Oscar- and Anthony Mann, who had cut his teeth making Westerns with James Stewart. Finally, as technical adviser Bronston hired the illustrious Spanish scholar Ramon Menendez Pidal, the greatest living authority on El Cid at that time. Don Ramon was also of great assistance to Rozsa during the composer's careful and thorough research on Spanish medieval music. Rozsa visited the libraries and archives of old monasteries and was given special access to documents dating back to the 13th and 14th centuries. Not many film composers would have gone through such painstaking research work, but Rozsa was a perfectionist and probably the greatest composer of all. When we think of the leading male stars in Hollywood at that time, Heston had become world famous and highly bankable after the huge success of "Ben-Hur" and the Oscar it won him. So he was the ideal man for the role. Bronston wanted Loren because of her fast-growing popularity, as well as by the the fact that hiring her would please the Italian investors and that would mean more money into the budget. Then enter the British, and what a fine supporting cast they are: the smoky-voiced Genevieve Page as Urraca(it is the Spanish word for jackdaw, by the way) who always reminds me of Lauren Bacall; the gentlemanly and self-composed Michael Hordern as Rodrigo's father, the handsome blue-eyed John Fraser as the arrogant but vulnerable prince Alfonso, Gary Raymond as prince Sancho, Douglas Wilmer as Rodrigo's Arab ally, and finally the recently deceased, excellent Czeck-born character actor Herbert Lom as the black-clad villain, a role initially offered to Orson Welles and who turned it down when he learnt that audiences wouldn't see his masked face. The great Orson needed the money very much to finance his own projects, but sometimes his ego was bigger than him. "El Cid" was a huge box-office hit all around the world and made Bronston a very rich man. The profits of the film were used to start preparing "The Fall of the Roman Empire", but then the refusal of Heston to work again with Loren -they detested each other- set in motion the snowball that would sweep the Bronston empire. Although three more epics were made: the exotic and spectacular "55 Days at Peking", the splendid but failed "The Fall of the Roman Empire" that bankrupted Bronston, and the minor and much cheaper "The Magnificent Showman", which was his swansong, he never again reached the heights of greatness and success he had reached with "El Cid". And then think that the tournaments and battles you see here were staged for real, with real armours, swords, catapults and everything, and thousands of people taking part -entire companies of the Spanish army and entire villages of civilians were hired as extras. Today you will never get that in a film: too costly and too complicate to coordinate. And of course, all of the Health and Safety rubbish laws that there are nowadays... If you play knights of the Round Table you can cut yourself, mind you. So enter CGI.But at least we have "El Cid" in all its glory. And please, let them not make a remake! Let them not destroy the old magic and beauty of cinema.