Polanski has increased the film's barbaric realism and fills the screen with blood, mud and brooding atmosphere.
Comment
07/02/08
Macbeth (1971)
87
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:23
Fresh:20
Rotten:3
Average Rating:8/10
Consensus: Roman Polanski's Macbeth is unsettling and uneven, but also undeniably compelling.
Runtime: 2 hrs 21 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: William Shakespeare's immortal play about a Scottish warrior (Jon Finch) whose wife's lust for power transforms him into inhuman monster is given it's rawest, most brutal screen treatment in this... [More]
Starring: Jon Finch, Nicholas Selby, Francesca Annis, Martin Shaw
Director: Roman Polanski
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Reviews for Macbeth
Polanski elicited naturalistic understated performances from his actors which bolstered the play's realism while bringing the poetry down to earth. Some would argue he brought it too far down.
07/03/08
No review available.
11/14/03
Polanski's movie is the quintessential film version of the Scottish play.
11/07/05
A worthy addition to the Bard's cinematic canon.
07/25/01
An over-the-top bu highly effective adaption of the Shakespeare classic with Polanski's disctinctive touches.
03/25/05
The wide-screen visuals swamp the dialogue, and the thematics have been turned inside out -- but that's what movie adaptations ought to do.
07/03/08
Top CriticNo review available.
06/16/05
No review available.
10/20/04
Polanski's worldview of brutish power-plays couldn't be more at home in Shakespeare's medieval times
12/06/09
a bloody, rip-roaring good time
08/27/06
Something of a disappointment.
12/06/05
Made shortly after the Sharon Tate murders, there's a disturbing resonance when Macbeth's gang of wild-eyed assassins butchers noble MacDuff's wife and children.
05/07/02
Shakespeare wrote “the play’s the thing,” but it makes an argument that the setting and direction can play just as important a role in dramatizing an adaptation.
06/10/02
Released just two years after Polanski's then pregnant wife was brutally murdered by members of the Manson family, and morbidly preoccupied with violence and cruelty
03/24/06
Forces Shakespeare into the modern terrain of sickly spiralling sensibilities, with blood, lust, and madness at the forefront.
03/16/04
Macbeth is dark, malignant, shot through with the most upsetting and gut-wrenching violence you will ever see in a major-studio release.
01/01/00
Shakespeare's bloodiest play gets a chilling existentialist update from Roman Polanski
07/26/02
This is an original film by an original film artist, and not an 'interpretation.'
10/23/04
Top CriticWith its apparent fixation on murder and cruelty, it is difficult to overlook a number of the unsettling autobiographical details in the film.
11/01/04
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