Like Fleischer's oeuvre as a whole, it's ripe for reconsideration-the Greatest Story Ever Told has been Retold and Retold, but Barabbas brings it back from the dead.

Problems of dubbing and pacing and a lack of scene-to-scene variety weigh the movie down, but Christopher Fry's pointed and intelligent free adaptation of Pr Lagerkvist's 1950 novel resists grandiloquence.

One might be likelier to forgive this if the film's declared intentions were less high-minded.

An extremely underrated Biblical epic.