Mike D'Angelo’s review published on Letterboxd:
69/100
Roll the end credits at the intermission and I'm on board with the masterpiece crowd. Second half is a mess, alas, yanking Lawrence from self-deification to abject cowardice in accordance with the increasingly desperate needs of the script, psychological plausibility be damned. (O'Toole's performance gets correspondingly shaky, especially relative to his forthright simplicity up to and including the attack on Aqaba.) All the eye-popping spectacle, the nothing-is-written romanticism, the sheer epic sweep is concentrated in the initial two hours and change; once Lawrence returns to Cairo and requests a desk job, the movie is never quite the same, even though he doesn't plant his ass in a chair even for five seconds to the best of my recollection. To tell the truth, even my proposed bisection wouldn't necessarily make this a personal favorite, as its most stirring sequences still tend to be distantly admirable—quite literally in two growing-dot-on-the-horizon instances. Only when Lawrence realizes that the man he's volunteered to execute (in order to avoid a tribal blood feud) is the same man he previously risked his life to rescue do I feel something deeper than my senses get rattled. Note to aspiring screenwriters: That coincidence is a complete fabrication. Embrace the lie.