30. Twelfth Night

Year: 1996
Director: Trevor Nunn

Like many other filmmakers, Trevor Nunn finds a 🌠new setting for a classic Shakespeare play while keeping the spirit of the original story and its themes intact. In this case, it's Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's timeless romantic comedy about love, mistaken identities, and disguises, now set against a 19th-century war-torn European coastal town. While Nunn makes several major changes and overall makes some questionable creative choices, Twelfth Night is still a funny romance about challenging societal expectations. It's a movie that almost makes Shakespeare walk hand-in-hand with Jane Austen.

29. Tromeo and Juliet

Year: 1996
Director: Lloyd Kaufman

Long before 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:James Gunn was the leading creative on multi-million superhero tentpoles, he was protege to Lloyd Kaufman, whose Troma Entertainment specialized in splatter-ific B-movies that blended horror and comedy with heaping doses of blood and mature fun. In 1996, the studio enjoyed modest success with its vulgar riff on Shakes🌸peare's Romeo and Juliet, simply titled Tromeo and Juliet, co-written by James Gunn and directed by Kaufman. As ⛄the title implies, Tromeo and Juliet reimagines the story of star-crossed lovers in a way only Troma could. Gone are the scenic sights of Verona, and in its place, squalid apartments, tattoo parlors, underground clubs, and lots of low-budget violence. Tromeo and Juliet is not for the faint of heart, but it dares to imagine Shakespeare with even more filth than the Bard ever had himself.

in the "Try Again" music video.

20. As You Like It

Year: 2006
Director: Kenneth Branagh

Kenneth Branagh is a filmmaker synonymous with Shakespeare, but even the least engrossing of his efforts, 2006's As You Like It, is a cut above the rest. An adaptation of Shakespeare's breezy romance about a young woman named Rosalind who disguises herself as a man but still catches the attention of strapping Orlando, Branagh's film version retells the story, setting the action in a European colony in 19th-century Japan during the Meiji Restoration. 🔥As You Like It is a star-studded affair (with Bryce Dallas Howard, Ramola Garai, Kevin Kline, Alfred Molina, and David Oyelowo among the cast) that brims with life and color while being breezy as a cherry blossom tree.

19. Grand Theft Hamlet

Year: 2024
Director(s): Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls

To troll, or not to troll – that was the question probably asked by those in the documentary Grand Theft Hamlet. Directed by and starring Sam Crane, with documentarian Pinny Grylls as co-director, Grand Theft Hamlet chronicles Crane's sincere efforts to put on a live production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet inside 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Grand Theft Auto Online during Covid-19 lockdowns. An example of Machinima filmmaking, Grand Theft Hamlet, exists in the tradition of all "putting on a show" stories, only this time, it's the spontaneity and casual cruelty of🐲 others in the game that stand in the way of the show going on. An unexpected meditation on making art by any means or tools possible, Grand Theft Hamlet earns a five-star wanted rating.

18. Much Ado About Nothing

Year: 2012
Director: Joss Whedon

Most people who get the stressful job of directing one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best superhero movies, such as The Avengers, might spenꦦd their vacation in, say, Tahiti. Just days full of leisure and long naps. But Joss Whedon is not most people. Duღring a break from the editing phase of The Avengers, Whedon got his closest friends together and performed Shakespeare in his actual home. This became his secret 2012 movie Much Ado About Nothing, a sexy black and white indie that sees the events of Shakespeare's comedy play out in the intimate space of Whedon's Santa Monica home. A timeless comedy with the warmth of a home movie, Much Ado About Nothing is a giddy thing.

17. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Year: 1990
Director: Tom Stoppard

Playwright Tom Stoppard, in his only work as a film director, brings his 1966 play to the screen in 1990's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Essentially a retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet from the point-of-view from꧅ its two biggest side characters, Stoppard's movie stars Tim Roth and Gary Oldman as Hamlet's closest friends who are clueless observers of the rotten state of Denmark. But unlike Hamlet, they are unable to actually do anything about it. A surrealist comedy, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead upholds Shakespeare's trademark motif of plays-within-plays while spinning a totally diffꦏerent yarn of its own.

16. Henry V

Year: 1944
Director: Laurence Olivier

With eye-popping Technicolor cinematography and a unique framing device that ushers audiences into the Globe Theater before immersing them into the story itself, Laurence Olivier's 1944 epic Henry V wowed moviegoers both in the UK and in the US as a stirring drama about bravery against all odds. It also wo🅰rked as pro-British propaganda at the tail end of World War 2. As detailed in his autobiography, Olivier was personally asked by the British Ministry of Information to make films to "enhance the British cause." "I don’t ꦯthink we could have won the war without 'Once more, unto the breach' somewhere in our soldiers' hearts," Olivier said.

15. Titus

Year: 1999
Director: Julie Taymor

In one of Broadway director J♋ulie Taymor's few dalliances into the world of cinema, her 1999 epic Titus is a strange creature, being a sweeping historical drama while coming across like a hazy hallucination. Anthony Hopkins plays Titus Andronicus, the title figure of Shakespeare's tragedy, a Roman general who falls from grace after a triumphant return home from war. Replete with anachronisms and bizarre dreamlike sequences, the mystifying T🥂itus might be better celebrated if it were not so long. Still, as a warning against systemic corruption and a meditation on the neverending violence of man, Titus' cranked-up camp makes it a cult classic.

14. Macbeth

Year: 2015
Director: Justin Kurzel

Not since Akira Kurosawa has anyone made Macbeth such a bloody and brutal thing of beauty. With his 2015 epic Macbeth, director Justin Kurzel provides a panoramic seat to Macbeth's awful rise to power and swift downfall; a magnificent Michael Fassbender channels some of his Magneto energy into Shakespeare's most tragic fi✱gure. Kurzel's Macbeth is an especially masculine interpretation of Shakespeare's darkest play, full of haunted imagery composed like a fine Baroque painting. If you've got a teenager struggling to understand the material, show them Kurzel's movie and watch them light꧃ up over a flick with unavoidable Dark Souls vibes.

13. Ran

Year: 1985
Director: Akira Kurosawa

While Akira Kurosawa initially set out to make a movie inspired by real-life Sengoku era warlord Mōri Motonari, it was fate that Motonari's life and family dynamics had echoes of Shakespeare's King Lear. That's when Kurosawa's project ultimately became Ran, his third movie based on Shakespeare after Throne of Blood (1957) and The Bad Sleep Well (1960). A sweeping samurai epic in vivid color, Ran tells of an aging warlord who divides his kingdom among his three sons, which leads to betrayal and ruin. As he did with Throne of Blood, Kurosawa masterfully marries Shakespeare's themes of power and chaos with Japanese Noh theater and a historical setting tailor-made for stories about dynasties in disarray.

12. Much Ado About Nothing

Year: 1993
Director: Kenneth Branagh

If you ever need to escape to the sun-drenched Mediterranean, pop in Kenneth Branagh's delectable Much Ado About Nothing from 1993. This star-studded affair brings a host of Hollywood A-listers – including Denzel Washington, Michael Keaton, Keanu Reeves, Emma Thompson, and Kate Beckinsale – and drops them in a vibrant Tuscany summer where love is in the air. Lush vineyards and rolling hills provide a picturesque backdrop for a breezy romantic comedy where two couples find each other despite the treachery and trickery that almost tear them apart. If life has you feeling down, get yourself a negroni and press play, and you'll sigh no moꦅre.

11. The Lion King

Year: 1994
Director(s): Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff

From the kingdom of Denmark to the kingdom of the African savannah, Disney's majestic animated classic The Lion King boasts plenty of intentional echoes of Shakespeare's plays like King Lear and Hamlet. (During pre-production and amid script rewrites, co-director Roger Allers was told by producer Jeffrey Katzenberg to "put in as much Hamlet as you can," according👍 to the 2003 book Makin' Toons by Allan Neuwirth.) Its story about a young lion, Simba, whose father is killed by his uncle Scar and returns years later to claim his place at the head of Pride Rock, is very obviously a Hamlet analog. However, Hamlet didn't have nearly as many karaoke bangers.

10. Chimes at Midnight

Year: 1965
Director: Orson Welles

Orson Welles' affinity towards the Shakespeare character Sir John Falstaff, a recurring presence across several of the Bard's plays, resulted in a movie that Welles considered to be his actual best work: Chimes at Midnight. A chopped-up mish-mash of several Shakespearean works, including Henry IV, Henry V, Richard II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Chimes at Midnight sees Keith Baxter as Prince Hal, heir to the throne of England, who must choose between upholding his duty a🔥s the next king or stay loyal to his carousing father-figure friend Falstaff (Welles). It took time for Chimes at Midnight to win widespread appreciation, but it now reigns supreme as one of the finest – and yes, original – Shakespeare movies ever made.

9. Romeo and Juliet

Year: 1968
Director: Franco Zeffirelli

Its eternal presence in high school classrooms everywhere makes it hard to see Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet as the revelation it was in 1968. When Shakespeare productions regularly cast painfully obvious adults as the title teenagers, Zeffirelli actually cast 17-year-old Leonard Whiting and 1🦩6-year-old Olivia Hussey to play Romeo and Juliet, respectively. With additional🌠 tweaks and choices that played to both Whiting and Hussey's unique strengths as actors, audiences, at last, saw the doomed lovers as the young and foolish kids they've always been. Zeffireelli's movie drew critical acclaim and still endures as one of the defining Shakespeare movies ever made, outdone only by films that have taken more daring swings.

8. West Side Story

Year: 1961
Director(s): Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins

Shakespeare wouldn't know a jet or a shark if it hit him in the face. But the smash ꦬhit movie musical West Side Story, a modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet set against racially tense 1950s New York City, is easily one of the finest "Shakespeare movies" ever made. Sprung from the stage musical by Jerome Robbins (with music by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim), the 1961 film version is a lively, high-energy tale of a forbidden romance between white street gang member Tony (Richard Beymer) and Puerto Rican rival Maria (Natalie Wood). A triumph in every sense of the word, West Side Story really rumbles.

7. Henry V

Year: 1989
Director: Kenneth Branagh

In 1989, Kenneth Branagh made his filmmaking debut and immediately knocked it out of the park with a movie widely considered one of the greatest Shakespeare adaptations of all time. Henry V stars Branagh (who also writes and directs) as King Henry V, who seeks to assert his right to rule France with a fierce army standing in his way. Simmering with political ambition aꦜnd face-in-the-mud brutality, Branagh's Henry V is the closest thing to knowing what Shakespeare would have made himself if given the Game of Thrones Blu-ray box set. Watch Branagh as King Henry, and it's no wonder why the director has cultivated his reputation as one of Hollywood's eminent experts on the Bard, bringing new life to a role and story centuries old.

6. Shakespeare in Love

Year: 1998
Director: John Madden

Its unpopular and controversial Oscar win aside, Shakespeare in Love is an inventive Hollywood romance that looks beyond the writings of Shakespeare to wonder about the man himself. Set in 1593 London, the m✱ovie follows William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes), whose suffocating writer's block comes to an end when he falls head over heels for Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), who inspires him like no ordinary muse. Sexy and sincere, Shakespeare in Love toys with the Bard's works to suggest that all we're looking for are already around us. All the world's a stage, after all.

5. 10 Things I Hate About You

Year: 1999
Director: Gil Junger

William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew gets a contemporary update in Gil Junger's teen rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You. While not a one-for-one retelling of the play, the movie nevertheless follows two suburban Seattle sisters, Kat (Julia Stiles) and Bianca (Larisa Oleynik), with the latter unable to date until her acerbic, unlikable older sister does so first. In comes bad boy Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger), who gets wrapped up into dating Kat for fi𓃲nancial reasons, only to realize that love doesn't cost a thing. A generation-defining classic, 10 Things I Hate 🍸About You works as both a witty Shakespeare homage and a modern teenage romance.

4. Romeo + Juliet

Year: 1996
Director: Baz Luhrmann

Shakespeare scholars know that the Bard's plays were written for common folk, making it the closest thing to trashy reality TV and pro wrestling for a 1590s audience. Fast forward to 1996, and Baz Luhrmann makes Shakespeare's "low culture" explicit with his high-saturated camp retelling of Shakespeare's greatest romance, Romeo + Juliet. (The "+" is important.) Transporting the story to Venice Beach, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes play the doomed lovers who come from rival business families. Though the dialogue remains mostly intact, the rest of the movie is Shakespeare, unlike you've seen it before, even with the abundance of "modernized" remakes out there. It just doesn't get any bett▨er or more clever than a news anchor giving the play's opening prologue and a glorious close-up of 🍷a handgun etched with "Sword 9mm Series S."

3. The Tragedy of Macbeth

Year: 2021
Director: Joel Cohen

In the first movie where director Joel Coen works solo (without his brother Ethan Coen), Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand put on an acting clinic in Joel Coen's black and white opus▨ The Tragedy of Macbeth. With strict faithfulness to the dialogue, Coen runs wild with the material to put on a work that feels otherworldly, like an unearthed piece of film forgotten from the era of German expressionism. Washington, a trained Shakespeare thespian, makes a case for himself as one of the greatest Shakespeare actors ever in Hollywood, playing Macbeth as a paranoid man desperate to cling to his glory even as the hour draws towards its end.

2. Throne of Blood

Year: 1957
Director: Akira Kurosawa

The haunted tragedy of Macbeth becomes a bewitching, fog-filled nightmare where power comes easy, but the strength to hold onto it costs everything. Akira Kurosawa's cinematic masterpiece Throne of Blood, released in 1957, reinterprets Macbeth as a piece of gothic samurai horror, where a feral Toshiro Mifune learns of his royal future from a sinister spirit in the forest. The first of Kurosawa's Shakespearean adaptations, Throne of Blood, fuses Shakespeare's storytelling with Noh theater to inspire awe and fear. The climax, where Toshiro Mifune is besieged by a hailstorm of arrows, is terrifying, not the least of which is because real arrows were being fired at hi✨m at the time.

1. Hamlet

Year: 1996
Director: Kenneth Branagh

Is Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film version of Hamlet the greatest Shakespeare movie ever ✱made? This be madness, yet there is method in't. With a matured and assured Branagh at the helm – as actor, writer, and director – Shakespeare's most celebrated tragedy makes it to the screen completely unabridged. (Never mind its "new" 19th century setting.) A sprawling and majestic adaptation with a mind-boggling huge cast, the movie feels as though Shakespeare wrote it just for Branagh to film it. We could go on about how great Hamlet is. But what's the point of all these words, words, words, when the work speaks for itself?