Strange at times but a most delightful tale of 8 stories from the mother land. I am confused as there isn't any x rated content in the movie. There is some nudity but nothing that warrants an x rating for sure. I would say its a mild R rated movie. Very humorous and at times strange. I enjoyed the adventurous tales but most of them are ended prematurely and with questions still unanswered. It would have been a better movie if they told 4 tales with more story to them. I never read the actual tales, but if they are anything like whats in the movie, it might be a good read. I have always enjoyed movies from the area depicted in the movie, I just wish that the stories had more content to keep me engaged more. I found myself wondering away from the movie more than once which tells me that the stories just were not interesting enough to spark my interest. That is why I think it would have been a much better movie with each tale telling more of a story then just cutting to one, 10 minutes later your cut to another story wondering what happened. Over all I would still give it a 6 out of 10 for the slapstick English humor.

It's entertaining but certainly not for the faint of heart. Pier Paolo Pasolini's take on (at least some of) Chaucer's ribald tales is grotesque, funny, ugly and never dull. Pasolini himself plays a particularly cadaverous looking Chaucer and the large cast of both English & Italian actors is excellent. Hugh Griffith plays the blustery Sir January and Josephine Chaplin is his unlikely May in "The Merchant's Tale," the most flat-out entertaining vignette. Laura Betti plays it especially naughty in "The Wife of Bath's Tale." Tom Baker is her unlucky fifth husband. "The Summoner's Tale" is absolute insanity. It's far more Pasolini than Chaucer, as if Ken Russell had directed The Three Stooges! The great cinematography is by Tonino Delli Colli.

If you watched this movie in order to get a crib of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, you'd be out of luck, and missing the point. Chaucer's underlying anti-clerical and pro-love-and-life philosophy may be there, but the substance is very different. Pasolini's 14th century England lives and dresses more like 16th Century Italy.The Miller's Tale is much grimmer when brought to the screen than Chaucer would have intended. "And Nicholas is branded on the bum, And God bring all of us to Kingdom Come" in Coghill's cheerful popular translation, becomes something more like the execution of Edward II. Not just on, but in. And the execution of a sodomite too poor to bribe his way off the griddle seems drawn out just to make a bad joke about the seller of "griddle cakes" (frittelli) plying his trade in the crowd.He is one of the more than fair share of handsome young men in the film, and there's more than a fair share of closeups of their middle regions, front and back, in tight-fitting breeches (not that I'm complaining).One feature that is almost entirely absent is any sense of pilgrimage. The storytellers appear only at the beginning and end of the tale. Instead we cut back to Chaucer himself (Pasolini himself, and very handsome he is too), writing the tales at a snail's pace. There are also long (by 2006 standards) tracking shots over indifferent scenery. Yet other scenes jump disconcertingly, the start of one tale used to mark the end of the previous one.

I wasted my money on the DVD version of this film, I sure don't recommend this film to anyone unless they find demeaning, ridiculing and perverting women in film very stimulating! ( I don't just mean the women in the film, all women in general) I found this film very sexist like most films of the early 1970's. The only great part of the film, unfortunately was the scene with the gay man being executed and the two young Scottish men murdering one another! How very disturbing! As for the rest of the film, I did not find it one bit humorous, and the sex scenes were terrible! It is no wonder Pasolini was murdered after making the film and (with all due respect) was also gay. Please don't waste your money on this film, it is bad enough to be airing on television!