AUSTRALIAN he-man Mel Gibson, best known for "Mad Max" and "Lethal Weapon", has picked up kinder notices for his "Hamlet" than perhaps he or anyone else expected. Put it down to inverted snobbery. He tries so hard that it seems churlish to deny...

SHOSTAKOVICH Hamlet: Suite. The Unforgettable Year 1919: The Assault on Krasnaya Gorka. Five Days-Five Nights: Suite. The Young Guard: Suite * Vassily Sinaisky, cond; Martin Roscoe (pn); BBC PO * CHANDOS 10361 (79:47) The principal problem with Shostakovich's film music is that he...

Justice Anthony Kennedy faced a problem he never had in his day job at the Supreme Court. The defendant has been dead for 400 years, ordinarily reason enough to dismiss criminal charges. But the show, as they say, must go on. So Kennedy had to...

Steve Coogan is the toast of Sundance. The British actor stars in the biggest acquisition of the film festival, "Hamlet 2," a bawdy comedy directed by Andy Fleming that takes politically incorrect jabs at inspirational teacher flicks like "Mr. Holland's Opus."Focus Features bought the film...

In making Hamlet (in 1947), Olivier was concerned, as he had been with Henry V, about avoiding the static quality of filmed theater. Without sacrificing the integrity of the play, he wanted to give visual fluency to theatrical material. Hamlet, of course, is radically different from Henry V, and in moving from the extroverted spectacle of the chronicle play to Shakespeare's most introverted chamber drama, Olivier altered his style severely: the dark, moody, claustrophobic atmosphere of this second ad...

Let me not seem to underrate the superior intelligence that has gone into many phases of [Olivier's] filmic Hamlet; it is not an outrage on taste and achieves a few illuminated moments. But I take it as a bad movie simply because it is far more conscious of being traditional cinema than of being traditional theatre…. (p. 528) The way in which this Hamlet best succeeds is, alas! that of a certain approved film-pattern: the action in relation to the camera movement is always tactful, physically ...

In making Hamlet, Olivier emphasised the fact that his film was an "Essay" in interpretation, and in doing so did much to disarm criticism. (p. 10) Olivier's description of his own Hamlet makes it possible to be more lenient than we might otherwise have been to the oddities of Alan Dent's revised script. Olivier has plucked, it seems, the heart out of Hamlet's mystery…. "This," Olivier said of his film by way of introduction, "is the tragedy of ...