105 mins |
Rated
M (Violence)
Directed by Joel Coen
Starring Frances McDormand, Corey Hawkins, Alex Hassell, Harry Melling, Bertie Carvel, Denzel Washington, Brendan Gleeson
and the Guardian says this...
What’s the point of another Macbeth movie? It wasn’t that long ago we had Justin Kurzel’s big realist version, with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Well, there’s always a point if the film is as compelling and visually brilliant as this. Director Joel Coen, working for once without brother Ethan, has delivered a stark monochrome nightmare, refrigerated to an icy coldness.
With Shakespeare’s text cut right back, it’s a version that brings us back to the language by framing the drama in theatrical, stylised ways: an agoraphobic ordeal in which bodies and faces loom up with tin-tack sharpness out of the creamy-white fog.
Coen’s visual contrivances have something of Kurosawa and Welles, with some German expressionist shadows, and this looks like a crime drama from the 30s or 40s – but entirely naturally rather than as an interpretative affectation. Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography is pellucid and austere and Stefan Dechant’s magnificent production design imagines Macbeth’s castle as a giant, rectilinear modernist house, with chilly courtyards bounded by vast vertiginous walls and corridors that extend like some sort of open-plan death row.
Disturbingly, there is no sense of what it looks like from the outside: we are always within its Escher-like weirdness, with battlements that can extend infinitely into the fog. This Macbeth is in many ways similar to the Coen brothers’ black-and-white crime thriller The Man Who Wasn’t There, which had Frances McDormand as the barber’s wife, brooding and suffering, a lot like Lady Macbeth.
And McDormand is of course Lady Macbeth here, a role she was born to play, bringing a hard-won domestic authority and her own sort of military determination to the plan to kill King Duncan.
Read more...
and the Guardian says this...
What’s the point of another Macbeth movie? It wasn’t that long ago we had Justin Kurzel’s big realist version, with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Well, there’s always a point if the film is as compelling and visually brilliant as this. Director Joel Coen, working for once without brother Ethan, has delivered a stark monochrome nightmare, refrigerated to an icy coldness.
With Shakespeare’s text cut right back, it’s a version that brings us back to the language by framing the drama in theatrical, stylised ways: an agoraphobic ordeal in which bodies and faces loom up with tin-tack sharpness out of the creamy-white fog.
Coen’s visual contrivances have something of Kurosawa and Welles, with some German expressionist shadows, and this looks like a crime drama from the 30s or 40s – but entirely naturally rather than as an interpretative affectation. Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography is pellucid and austere and Stefan Dechant’s magnificent production design imagines Macbeth’s castle as a giant, rectilinear modernist house, with chilly courtyards bounded by vast vertiginous walls and corridors that extend like some sort of open-plan death row.
Disturbingly, there is no sense of what it looks like from the outside: we are always within its Escher-like weirdness, with battlements that can extend infinitely into the fog. This Macbeth is in many ways similar to the Coen brothers’ black-and-white crime thriller The Man Who Wasn’t There, which had Frances McDormand as the barber’s wife, brooding and suffering, a lot like Lady Macbeth.
And McDormand is of course Lady Macbeth here, a role she was born to play, bringing a hard-won domestic authority and her own sort of military determination to the plan to kill King Duncan.