Most critics lean warm, and the praise clusters in one place: the spectacle. Cleopatra’s entry into Rome comes up repeatedly, as do the sea battle at Actium and the barge, and several reviewers credit the thousands of real extras and the scale of the sets with a sense of the ancient world that studios no longer attempt. Elizabeth Taylor is the other point of agreement; even reviewers cool on the film grant that her presence carries it, and the earliest notices credit Mankiewicz’s script with unusual literacy for a costume epic.
The reservations gather around the drama beneath the pageantry. Several find the screenplay wordy and the story rambling, and Empire argues that Taylor and Burton never convince as lovers. The spread is wide, from outright admiration to Slant Magazine’s view that it is neither a triumph nor an interesting disaster but simply dull. The New Yorker splits the difference, finding the dialogue absurd and recommending it anyway for the look of the thing.