Macbeth dir. Geoffrey Wright The opening scene of Macbeth is a keeper: Three witchy, redheaded schoolgirls desecrate a graveyard with screwdrivers and bloody paint They shriek and giggle; they gouge the eyes of angels; their callous, pale beauty is more alarming than...

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Jake Waid rubbed his bloodshot eyes, blankly stared at a script for Shakespeare's "Macbeth," then resumed an unfamiliar struggle with a set of lines."Tleil tsu tlax yei l kusheek'eiyi ye yageeyi kwasatinch, ch'a aan yak'ei," he read slowly of what would normally be, "So foul...

Battles are waged to the beat of drums, witches as land otters slink across the stage and Banquo's ghost dons a raven mask in a Tlingit language adaptation of Shakespeare's brutal and bloody tale of a murderous Scottish lord.Sprung from the rain forests of southeast...

Welles's approach to Macbeth was bound to be unusual. First of all, he imposed upon it a theme which has no parallel in the text, and announced it himself at the beginning of the film…. The words were spoken over shots of the witches seen amid a swirl of mists at work over their cauldron, shaping the clay image of a baby, which was to be a symbol used throughout the film. Macbeth, Welles said, was a story which involves 'plotting against Christian law and order'; the hostile forc...

[In Macbeth, Welles adopted] an expressionistic or subjective mode in which the consciousness of the hero colors the world which we see around him. If one is able to overlook glaring errors in execution, there is a good deal to be learned from watching what Welles has done. Consider, for example, the way in which his camera treats Macbeth. Many of the shots are from waist level, looking up, so that Welles's face seems to tower over the viewer, and, when his hand is extended, it looms grotesquely larg...

Simply what he is and has been makes Welles the quintessential type of Big Experimental Cult hero—always achieving failure yet bringing it off brilliantly, decking it with eloquence and a certain magnificence; fusing in each film the vices and the virtues appropriate to them. Welles is the eternal Infant Prodigy, and as such wins the indulgence of adult critics and the fervid sympathy of the younger generation, which sees in him a mirror of its own budding aspirations and adventurous near-successes&#...