Sadly Over-hyped

Best movie of this year hands down!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The William Shakespeare play about a easily influenced and conniving man, who mercilessly killed many due to his greed for power, was well played out in this rendition of the original play. The film was quite accurate in comparison to the original play. The plot events were played out well, all the discussions, even the shortest ones, were played out perfectly. The film was impactful, and the characters were easily remembered when re-reading the play. The characters in this film were accurate, and realistic. A personal flaw I found in this movie was the length of the film, a lot of things were dragged on, and other parts went too fast, which resulted in me missing the important bits of information. But other then that, the film was actually quite interesting. (P.S. this review is for a class project, my teacher is kind of cruel, so just ignore this review altogether pls n thnx)

I think this is my favorite movie for Shakespeare Month! The reason why this movie is so great is because of how amazing the atmosphere is and the great action scenes and drama. This movie has really made me realize how violent and sexual Shakespeare could get. Well, I'm not that familiar with the original play, but I believe it's faithful. There's a scene where there's nothing but naked women (or witches) huddled around a cauldron. The witches are probably the thing about this story that people remember the most. They really aren't in it for very long but their scenes are so great and so important everyone takes notes of them.Many people are unaware that MacBeth was in fact a real king of Scotland. Well, I don't think the witches were real. Well, maybe there were women who did indeed claim to be witches and their prophecy turned out to be accurate by chance. Even the very beginning of this movie is brilliant by showing the witches on the beach. MacBeth works great as a villain protagonist. At the same time, the true hero of the story, MacDuff is very interesting and you really do want him to succeed in slaying MacBeth. Yeah, there's a lot of blood in this movie.I am reminded of Penn Jillette saying that it's silly for people to think that video games are a bad influence because pop culture has always been violent, including Shakespeare. Yeah, the gore and sexuality in this movie really was pretty shocking to me. I guess as movie content ratings were invented, a lot of people were just experimenting with it. We even get some great surreal scenes where MacBeth continually looks at himself in mirrors over and over. Everything makes sense in the end and it's so great such a long movie keeps your interest for so long. It's just a beautiful looking film and I know where that "Out damned spot!" line came from. ****

Hugh Hefner put up the money for Roman Polanski's grim and gruesome adaptation of Shakespeare's MacBeth. Polanski was coming off the Sharon Tate murder by the Manson family, and MacBeth's words express his own nihilistic world view: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Somehow I missed this film back in 1971 even though I was taking college courses in Shakespeare. I only recently saw it. I was a little scared because MacBeth is generally thought of as an unlucky play.

To say that this adaptation is a bit of a bloodbath is a bit of an understatement, but you cannot deny that this film from Roman Polanski is quite possibly the definitive film version of Shakespeare's play, which is very complicated to even contemplate transcribing to screen. The cinematography is excellent, as is the script. It is true that there are a lot of disturbing scenes, chiefly Lady Macbeth's nude sleepwalker scene and King Duncan's death. Roman Polanski should be commended for how much he managed to get into the film, and he somehow made it all effective. Any scene with the three witches, the murder of Macduff's family, plus the part when Macbeth sees Banquo's ghost was very well done.(I saw an amateur production of this, and not only was it disappointing, but that particular scene was the worst aspect of it) The performances were brilliant, Jon Finch(who did start off uncomfortable) is great on the whole as the treacherous thane-turned-king, and Francessca Annis was nigh-on-perfect as Lady Macbeth. And Martin Shaw was excellent as Banquo. From the suitably eerie opening scene, to the superb climax, this is a near-perfect adaptation, there were just some bits that were really disturbing to watch, that deserves more recognition. 9/10 Bethany Cox