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I’m one of the anesthetized many who couldn't stop watching Gavin O’Connor’s non-stop crime thriller. This script could be a model for how to maintain high interest. Using a multi-time-structured plot he cuts from the present to the past, to the future, and back a...

The latest in a series of movie adaptations of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel. This movie received some criticism for Zaillian’s script. However, if you’ve never read about these faults…. you’ll never miss them. What picks you up and carries this mov...

After election, and in keeping with his promises, he passed bills that offered free textbooks for schools and night classes to reduce adult illiteracy. He immediately channeled funds toward education, hospitals, bridges and roads. After he was elected to the senate in...

This movie goes down in film history as one of Lean’s most worthwhile directorial efforts. Shortly after WWII Robert Altman’s wife, Kathryn, recalled that Altman happened to wander into the movie by accident. He said that if seemed pretty slow, but within 20 minutes he...

It seems to be impossible for the many directors who attempt to do a Macbeth adaptation to resist “improving” on the original. Making Lady Macbeth more or less ambitious and trying to justify the King’s murder is a tempting “fix”. In his movie Kurosawa gives it a try,...

opens his movie with original WWII film scenes of men and guns in a montage of cuts, some as short as 5 frames. He includes shots of a hospital, nurses (witches), Stewart (Macbeth) and Turner (Banquo) in modern battle dress. This is not your grandfather’s Macbeth!.

Shot on video – 1:133 screen ratio in 1979 – staged in totally black theater-in-the-round. Within the limitations of shooting in this setting, Philip Casson has taken full advantage of cine-technique, making great use of close-ups. He often asks actors to deliver lines...

MACBETH – directed by Justin Kurzel – Macbeth by Michael Fassbender – Lady Macbeth by Marion Cotillard. Of the five directors I reviewed in this project Kurzel’s interpretation is the most gory, with blood leaking out of every pour and body parts littering the landscap...

Proving, once again, that incorporating cinematic technique can make any of Shakespeare’s plays more understandable and enjoyable, Polanski, brings formally off stage violence to the front, and has directed a visually stunning interpretation of one of the Bard’s most v...

MACBETH – ORSON WELLS – 1948 - movie Adapted from a 1643 play by William Shakespeare. - A really nice touch was in the final act, when Malcolm was crowned King, Welles inserted a cut-a-way to the murdered Banquo’s young son, Fleance, holding a small crown… as foretold...