10 Shakespeare Movies Everybody Should See - Part 2 (6-10)
This piece is a continuation of a previous article; find the first half (Movies 1-5) here ! Adapting Shakespeare to the screen presents a myriad of problems and opportunities for the filmmaker. After all, centering a camera on a soliloquizing actor as they stare off into the nothingness of filmic space could, in fact, be perceived as stagey and artificial to a film-going audience of the early 21st century. None other than Laurence Olivier thought to have solved this problem with his version of “Hamlet” from 1948, by rendering Hamlet’s monologues as products of a voiced-over, interior, thought process. Audiences and critics seem to have responded, granting the film the Oscar for Best Picture, and Olivier himself the award for Best Actor. A filmmaker such a Roman Polanski can choose to focus on atmosphere and setting when adapting the Bard, as in his 1971 version of “Macbeth,” where the cold, rocky crags of Scotland help to inform the bloody-minded bleakness of events as they unfold, s...