SOURCE: Simon, John. Review of Love's Labour's Lost. National Review 52, no. 11 (19 June 2000): 59-60.

In the following excerpted review, Simon finds nothing redeeming in Kenneth Branagh's cinematic Love's Labour's Lost, and critiques the individual performances of its cast.

Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost … [is] adapted into a musical with songs (most of them standards) by Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, and Kern, sung and danced by a cast of mostly nonsingers and nondancers. The play's minor characters, forming an important subplot, are barely more than walk-ons, with Holofernes, for instance, changed and trimmed into Holofernia, giving the distinguished Geraldine McEwan a part that could have been handled by a hologram. Only Nathan Lane, as Costard, gets half a chance for, as it were, a half-life.

The action is moved to 1939 in a kingdom of Navarre oblivious to the threats of war, including that between Shakespeare's language and the pop-song lyrics. The...