Powerful, intelligent and ultimately tragic depicting the battle and ultimate end of The Age of Reason by the hands of Ignorant Dogma. A Very disturbing ending and that is good. It leaves you stunned and torn inside for days after. I rated Agora 9/10 on IMDb. Learn more and add it to your Watchlist

Somewhat ponderous at times, then explosive episodes, in which there is a lot of action.I like ancient Roman fiction; and this is a deviation from the norm, which is unexpected. Rachel Weisz seems to have put heart and soul into this, as if she really believes in the film's message. At times, it wanders into doco territory with learning at the core; the fictionalised aspect seems unrealistic, but apparently is backed up by historical sources. I would recommend to historical fiction fans, but the layperson might not find much of interest here.

This movie depicts 4th century Alexendria at a time when its streets were crowded with Greek philosophers, Ptolemaic Egyptians, Roman soldiers, Jews and early Christians. We focus on the library, although there was so much more to this important city at this time.The film succeeds spectacularly in bringing this to life. This alone makes the movie worth watching.But even more than that, the movie tells a story based on a series of events involving group of historical figures: Theon, Hypatia, Orestes, St Cyril of Alexandria and others. Hypatia is the interesting one here, passionately and credibly played by Rachel Weisz. The movie is not quite historically accurate, but it is a hell of a good story based loosely on historical events.But wait, even more than that, the film has religious fundamentalism and intolerance as its main theme. I guess you could say it takes the side of science over religion, freedom over faith, reason over madness. It shows the exact moment we entered the Dark Ages.In my second viewing, I came to appreciate Oscar Isaac's performance even more. He is a wonderful actor. The really powerful character here is Davus. I'm not sure this fascinating, complex character was properly fleshed out in the script, but it was a tremendous performance by Max Minghella.I absolutely loved this intelligent, moving and important movie. I wish all movies were like this. I didn't want the movie to end. They should use it as the basis for a mini-series.

This is a brilliant movie and I can barely fault it (my only complaint is that it implies that Hypatia was an Atheist, when as a Neoplatonist she was almost certainly a polytheist). I think the reason it has not been more successful is because it is about a time and place most people know very little about. I recommend this movie to all intelligent adults but, unless you have a reasonable background in classics and/or ancient history, I suggest you look up a bit about the period, and about Hypatia, first. The movie is not anti-Christian - a careful assessment of the story shows this (via a number of sympathetically portrayed Christians). Unfortunately so few Christians are actually aware of their early history that many of them will freak out when they realise how violent their history has been (at times) and declare the movie anti-Christian propaganda.