Just so...so bad

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The "Out, damned spot" bit was killer.The "Out, out, brief candle" bit was worth the wait.Stewart's performance overall was stunning. Captain Picard was fun to watch and you could detect Stewart's gravitas in it; Dr. Xavier didn't stretch Stewart in the least and it was just a sweet paycheck for him, which I fully applaud him collecting. But this here is what Stewart was built for. The man is a beautiful monster in this performance.The whole cast was nearly pitch perfect.The witches were gloriously horrifying. The "Double, bubble, toil and trouble" bit was innovative and fun.Watch Lady Macbeth transform from a supremely manipulative banshee from Hell into a guilt-wracked suicidal lunatic.If you don't understand what's going on all the time, you're not alone, and take heart: this film's visuals help you along much of the way, without treating you like a moron.As for the script itself -- it's Shakespeare: raw, economical, polyrhythmic, full of slyly naughty jokes to try and catch, and full of linguistic innovation. Few writers have displayed such freedom with the language. If you're a writer, I advise you to take a cue from Shakespeare and just start breaking rules and making up new ones. This version of Macbeth should inspire you to do that.

I get the point that other reviewers have made, a lot of Shakespeare's works do work in a modern setting. But to me, it only works if you also update the dialogue. I found the text jarring with the setting, the exact text (as far as I could tell) spoken in an utterly different context. Zero believability. No basis for a suspension of disbelief.If they'd had the sense to update the language a bit and make it fit a 21st century authoritarian regime it might have worked a lot better, at least for me.It also lost the clues in the prophecies that fool Macbeth, that could have been included without difficulty.

Plot: A nobleman murders and usurps his King before being destroyed by his enemies and himselfThis is the film adaptation of a highly successful stage performance which changed the setting of the play to a post-Soviet Eastern European country. The actors are, as you'd expect, excellent, with Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth deserving special mention for her performance, in which she looks like a vampire squid with killer cheekbones. Unfortunately over-similar costuming, dim lighting and a surfeit of beefy white actors render many of the supporting characters somewhat indistinguishable. The setting is interesting and gives rise to some of the neater touches (the woods of Dunsinane are soldiers in ghillie suits) but is insufficiently explored - especially the ideological dimension. The main problem however is that the director is a novice. Too often there is a clear diving line between stagey, actorly scenes full of dialogue and ineptly shot but cinematic action scenes. The whole thing never quite gels together, never managing to be satisfactory as a recorded play or adapted film.Worth one viewing.

A visually brutal adaptation of a theatrical production that combines the experience of stylized European director's theater with the documentary-film imagery of war, Stalinist totalitarianism, dystopian landscapes. The result is not as much a drama (although the acting itself is riveting) as a series of rapidly-changing tableaux that bring a striking newness to Shakespeare's language. Sir Patrick Stewart performs the role of a lifetime. As a Shakespearian actor, he manipulates Shakespeare's words so that they ring authentically, as if we are hearing them for the first time.This Macbeth channels the early Polish Roman Polanski, the imaginings of a Stanley Kubrick, the gritty grayness of 1984. It HAD to be shown as a PBS "Great Performances," for I cannot imagine it attracting a commercial audience, or even a film festival one, since it seems more like an brilliant artistic experiment that might have its most successful showing in the context of a museum. It is complex, worthy of endless dissection of words and images. My experience of it had less emotion involvement than fascination with creative process behind the filmmaking.