Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: you’d have to have a pretty demented sense of the word “original” to claim that Australian arch-stylist Baz Luhrmann […]

There are a whole lot of films based on the plays of William Shakespeare – some of them aren’t even Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet – and the great majority of them are bad. Alright, “bad” is a strong word: some of them are bad, such as George Cukor’s stillborn 1936 Romeo and Juliet that […]

Let us, just for the moment, set aside the gross intellectual dishonesty underpinning every single story beat of Roland Emmerich’s Elizabethan political thriller Anonymous – a herculean task, I will admit. But simply because Emmerich and screenwriter John Orloff and a whole bunch of classically-trained British actors who, in a happier world, would all know […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/13 World premiere: 14 February, 2011, Berlin Film Festival Ralph Fiennes does not, evidently, lack for bravery: the actor’s directorial debut is a Shakespearean adaptation, and one in which he, himself, plays the lead role; and it is, just to make things extra-fun, the first-ever feature version* of one of the author’s […]

It’s not exactly the case that Gnomeo & Juliet is bad. That’s not at all the right word. It’s a lot more damn bizarre than it is bad. The part where it recasts Romeo and Juliet into the world of living garden gnomes from two neighboring yards, that’s nothing. Anybody who has made it to […]

A more scattershot, multiple-personality comedy than Hamlet 2 you’ll rarely see, and after some thought I think I’ve figured out the chief reason why: it quickly establishes in bold, broad strokes that its main character is an idiotic fuck-up, and then proceeds to tell a whole story that hinges on our hope that he’ll make […]