Filmmakers have long mined the riches of The Bard to create some of the most lasting and universal stories in the movie history. With his 38 collected tragedies, comedies, and historical epics, Shakespeare remains one of Hollywood's most prolific screenwriters - after all, his works have been turned into films many times over, adapted splendidly by the likes of Franco Zefferelli (Romeo and Juliet), Baz Lurhmann (William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet), Kenneth Branagh (Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Love's Labour's Lost, As You Like It), Orson Welles (Othello) and Akira Kurosawa (Ran).

But which Shakespearean adapatations fared the best with the critics? Find out below in our countdown of the 30 Best Shakespeare Movies of all time. As The Bard himself might say, "To thine own Tomatometer be true..."

• Each critic from our discrete list gets one vote, all weighted equally.
• A movie must have 20 or more rated reviews to be considered.
• Reviews without ratings are not counted toward the results.
• Because reviews are continually added, manually and otherwise, we have a cutoff date at which new reviews are not counted. The current cut off date is 7/14/2008.
• We use a weighted formula (Bayesian) to account for variation in the number of reviews per movie. The winners are determined by the rankings, designated as the "adjusted score," after applying said formula:

  (r ÷ (r+m)) × t + (m ÷ (r+m)) × a, with "r" representing the number of rated reviews, "m" the minimum number of reviews needed for a movie to qualify, "t" the Tomatometer score, and "a" the average Tomatometer of all the qualifying movies

• In the event of a tie, the following, in order, will be used to break the tie: the user tomatometer percent, the total number of cream of the crop reviews, and the number of fresh cream of the crop reviews.