As William Shakespeare once wrote, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." We're not about to argue with the Bard. And with the release of Hamlet 2, we at RT have pored over the reviews to bring you "The Play's the Thing," a list of the 25 best-reviewed films about life in and around the theater.

Our countdown has it all, from backstage drama (All that Jazz, Bullets over Broadway) to the complexities of writing for the stage (Shakespeare in Love, The Lives of Others), from actors acting out (Opening Night) to theater life as a metaphor for turbulent times (Cabaret, Farewell My Concubine). So break a leg with "The Play's the Thing!"

• 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 8/20/2008.
• 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.