Pier Paolo Pasolini's very free, very barbaric "Medea," which is less an adaptation of the Euripides play than an interpretation of it, is not completely successful, but it is … full of eccentric imagination and real passion….

If your priorities are such, Pasolini's "Medea" can be an excellent argument for the kind of literal movie made by [Michael] Cacoyannis….

"Medea" is something else entirely. Pasolini has the monumental and marvelous presumption to put himself ahead of Euripides (who was not, after all, a moviemaker), in an attempt to translate into film terms the sense of a prehistoric time, place and intelligence in which all myths and rituals were real experiences….

Pasolini's Medea is no longer a rather ill-tempered woman spurned, an early Women's Liberationist, a mother guilty of the sort of murders that were … appalling to the ancient Greeks….

In Pasolini's conception, Medea is a primeval soul who erupts almost spontaneously when transplanted into a civilization ruled by order. And this, I think, is where the film goes awry.

There is no real conflict between Pasolini's conception and Euripides's. Pasolini's supplements the other's, but because nothing in Pasolini's imagery in the scenes in Corinth is equal to the passion of the original text, or to Pasolini's own scenes early in the film, the movie seems to go thin and absurdly melodramatic….

"Medea" is uneven, but I admire the reckless courage of its conception, even when it goes wrong. When it is right, as in the poetic and funny prologue, delivered by the centaur …, and in its eerie evocation of Medea's world, which (according to Pasolini) is our subconscious world, it is superb.