SOURCE: Crowl, Samuel. “Zeffirelli's Hamlet: The Golden Girl and a Fistful of Dust.” Cineaste 24, no. 1 (1998): 56-61.

In the following review, Crowl examines Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 film version of Hamlet, starring Mel Gibson as Hamlet and Glenn Close as Gertrude. Crowl praises Zeffirelli's casting, textual editing, and exploitation of cinematic space and landscape, and claims that the film offers a full exploration of the play as a family romance centered around Gertrude.

Franco Zeffirelli, the maker of the most commercially successful of all Shakespeare films, has received paradoxically less critical attention than any of the other major directors of Shakespeare films. Olivier, Welles, Kurosawa, Kozintsev, and Branagh all have found their work at the center of scrutiny in the growing body of critical literature devoted to Shakespeare on film. But not Zeffirelli. Of the six books which appeared between 1988 and 1992, and which constituted a mini-explosion of critical interest in Shakespeare...