SOURCE: Walker, Elsie. “Pop Goes the Shakespeare: Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet.” Literature-Film Quarterly, 28, no. 2 (2000): 132-39.

In the review below, Walker examines Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, focusing on the way in which the film's intertextuality, as well as its choice of setting, encourages the audience's active response.

Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, has attracted comparatively little critical attention even in the most recent collections of Shakespeare film criticism. Luhrmann's film is mentioned but in passing in the 1997 essay collection Shakespeare, The Movie: Popularizing the plays on film, TV, and video. In the 1998 “New Casebooks” collection of Shakespeare film essays Luhrmann's film is not mentioned at all, whereas Shakespeare films made after Luhrmann's (such as Kenneth Branagh's 1996 Hamlet) are already mentioned in the same breath as the aesthetically polemic films of Welles, Kozintsev, Olivier, and Kurosawa. The criticism of Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet to...