["Teorema"] is the kind of movie that should be seen at least twice, but I'm afraid that a lot of people will have difficulty sitting through it even once….

"Teorema" (theorem) is a parable, a movie of realistic images photographed and arranged with a mathematical precision that drains them of comforting emotional meaning….

"Teorema" is a cranky and difficult film made fascinating by the fact that Pasolini has quite consciously risked [a calamitous response from his audience]….

"Teorema" is not my favorite kind of film. It is open to too many whimsical interpretations grounded in Pasolini's acknowledged Marxism and atheism, which, like Bunuel's anticlericism, serve so well to affirm what he denies. Pasolini has stated that the young man is not meant to represent Jesus in a Second Coming. Rather, he says, the young man is god, any god, but the fact remains that he is God in a Roman Catholic land….

Pasolini doesn't load this film with little calculated messages of purple prose…. Even though Pasolini is a talented novelist and poet, the film is almost completely visual. The actors don't act, but simply exist to be photographed. The movie itself is the message, a series of cool, beautiful, often enigmatic scenes that flow one into another with the rhythm of blank verse.

This rhythm—one of the legacies of the silent film, especially of silent film comedy—[is hard] … to accept. The seductions are ticked off one after the other with absolutely no thought of emotional continuity. So are the individual defeats, which are punctuated by recurring shots of a desolate, volcanic landscape swept by sulphurous mists….

"Teorema" is a religious film, but I think it would take a very hip Jesuit to convert it into a testament to contemporary Roman Catholic dogma.