When the King of Denmark suddenly dies. his son, Crown Prince Hamlet, returns home to find that his Uncle Claudius has usurped the throne and married his sister-in-law, Hamlet’s recently-widowed mother. One night Hamlet is visited by his father’s ghost, who commands him to avenge his murder at Claudius’ hands.

Quote:
Arguably the finest screen Hamlet of all time, even though the language barrier does somewhat moot comparisons between Smoktunovsky and Olivier, Kozintsev’s film won a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival and, in 1967, was nominated for a Best Foreign Picture Golden Globe. By no means a “filmed play,” Kozintsev’s HAMLET is profoundly cinematic; it is also swept clean of Freudian accoutrements and treated with somber fervor closer to Orson Welles’ Macbeth. Boris Pasternak’s modern-language translation is used for the dialogue. The tradition of the “active” (read: dissident) HAMLET, with his fixation on the imprisonment motif, would culminate 15 years later at the Taganka Theater, when national folk-singing icon Vladimir Vysotsky (see BRIEF ENCOUNTERS) displaced Smoktunovsky as the ultimate Russian embodiment of the part. — seagullfilms.com

Hamlet.1964.001.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/F8876CA55F5011D/Hamlet.1964.001.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/6CAC859B7FDB157/Hamlet.1964.002.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English

The post Grigori Kozintsev – Gamlet AKA Hamlet (1964) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

In 1978, the BBC set itself the task of filming all of William Shakespeare’s plays for television. The resulting productions, renowed for their loyalty to the text, utilised the best theatrical and television directors and brought great performances from leading contemporary actors.

Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes a pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

Romeo and Juliet.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/29CAD4E93798C7A/Romeo.and.Juliet.1978.x264.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Alvin Rakoff – Romeo & Juliet (1978) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Michael Billington:
There are many ways of approaching Shakespeare’s youthful tragedy: Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh take the scenic route in this new production. We are plunged into a vividly imagined 1950s Italy of dark-suited men, petticoated women, bicycling friars, patriarchal oppression and frantic partying. You feel Fellini is due any moment to film it with a movie camera and, even if the result has its oddities, the production certainly has a pulsating energy.

The big draw is the casting of Lily James and Richard Madden, who played opposite each other in the Branagh movie of Cinderella, as the doomed lovers. They acquit themselves very well: they have youth, looks and passion on their side. I was puzzled, however, by some of the directorial decisions that mean we miss Juliet’s rapid maturation from inexperienced child to married woman. James’s Juliet seems very knowing from the start and when Romeo says “she doth teach the torches to burn bright” you wonder if it is because she is at the time huskily crooning a song in the style of a torch singer.

This is a Juliet who swigs from a bottle on the balcony and later anticipates Romeo’s arrival with a positively orgasmic ecstasy. James is excellent in the second half where Juliet vividly imagines the horror of entombment but, by placing so much stress on the character’s sexuality, the production sacrifices some of her vulnerability.

Madden gets more chance to show Romeo’s progress from self-absorbed moper to someone genuinely inflamed by love. Madden is especially good at articulating Romeo’s challenge to fate on “I defy you, stars” and suggests he is infected by the Veronese cult of violence: at one point, he even threatens to strike his spiritual adviser, Friar Laurence, who for once seems roughly the same age.

That is in stark contrast to Mercutio who is here played by Derek Jacobi. The idea is clearly that Mercutio is a dandified old swinger who likes to hang out with young men, and Jacobi brings to the role both a sashaying charm and his own minute precision with the verse: it is a pleasure to hear him treat the Queen Mab speech not as a manic rant but as a series of microscopic images so that we actually imagine “the wings of grasshoppers”. It just seems improbable that Jacobi’s humorous lounge-lizard should suddenly turn into a reckless swordsman.

But the production is staged with great fluency and Christopher Oram’s design, dominated by soaring columns that reminded me of Palermo’s Teatro Massimo, allows for striking effects: the best is when Juliet retires for the night in a circular white tent that descends on her like a shroud. There is also good work from a strong supporting cast: a constant feature of the Branagh season. Meera Syal plays the Nurse not as a toothless old crone but as a friskily mischievous figure who genuinely shares Juliet’s amorous excitement, and Michael Rouse’s Capulet is a dangerous hysteric who abuses all the women in his power.

The whole thing is done with a speed and vigour that ensures we are never bored; and if I generally preferred the first half to the second, that is because Shakespeare’s tragedy itself depends too much on chance and the faulty Italian postal service.

Part I.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/EBFBFF807F555B8/Part_I.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/E50208B98BA1801/Part_II.mkv

Languae(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Kenneth Branagh, Rob Ashford & Benjamin Caron – Romeo and Juliet [Branagh Theatre Company] (2016) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In Per Kirkeby’s set with a blue backdrop beside a woodland lake Lene Adler Petersen pronounces Ophelia’s madness monologue from Hamlet, but she is constantly interrupted by the sound of two wooden blocks and has to start again: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance …” The words thereby rapidly lose their meaning and our interest turns to the specific sounds emerging from Adler Petersen’s lips and the choreographed ways she touches her face. The film starts and ends classically with a zoom in from an establishing shot and a zoom out onto a concluding tableau in which Ophelia throws herself into the lake, but in between the film is experimental, with two cameras on tracks abiding by a carefully conceived but highly impenetrable system. The frame thus changes apparently according to signals from Leth, and occasionally the camera seems to track right off the set into the sylvan wilderness. At its premiere at the Carlton it was shown before Roman Polanski’s Dance of the vampires.

Jørgen Leth - 1968 - Ofelias blomster [DVD-PAL].mkv

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Language(s):Danish
Subtitles:English

The post Jørgen Leth – Ofelias blomster AKA Ophelia’s Flowers (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Chokichi Kuwahata was once a leading actor, but he is ravaged by dementia and old age now. His daughter and the men in her life go against his wishes and place him in a retirement home. He slips away one day and meets another offspring from a different union. Will this lead to his improvement or deterioration? What does it all have to do with Shakespeare?

Lear.on.the.Shore.2017.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DD+5.1.H.264-ARiN.mkv

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Runtime: 	1 h 46 min
Size: 	2.69 GiB
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https://nitro.download/view/083F375091538A3/Lear.on.the.Shore.2017.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DD+5.1.H.264-ARiN.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Masahiro Kobayashi – Umibe no Ria AKA Lear on the Shore (2017) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

One of the greatest and best known Nekrosius productions.
Hamletas marked the beginning of Nekrosius’s studio, Meno Fortas, which is dedicated to performance and actor training and earned Nekrosius the 1998 St. Kristoforas for highest theatrical achievement in Europe.

“It is myth, it is ritual, it is the eternalization of a world that Eimuntas Nekrosius concentrates ferociously and yet very sweetly, which the Lithuanian director shows and excavates with the poetry of objects and the pain of betrayed affections, of revenge to be carried out because a man was killed by his brother who then also married his wife. In a word, all this is Hamletas, which Eimuntas Nekrosius brings back on stage fifteen years after its debut in Parma in September 1997, same cast, same energy with the added respect of a profound sense of bewilderment, a tension that tightens the movements, shapes them and models, mechanisms of a ritual that has become natural and magical in its sedimentation in a theatrical time untouched in its eternity of signs by the time of aesthetics and fashions. Hamletas has not lost its power and indeed – undoubtedly thanks to the Shakespearean text which shines in its greatness and contradictory narration – it maintains an intensity of reading, of emotional power that should not be underestimated. What happens on stage happens for the first time and yet it is eternal and not only because the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark is archetypal as are the texts of the Greek tragedians, but because the actors of Nekrosius live it, manage it with intensity, without ever lose concentration, officiants of a rite, rather than interpreters of a part or a narrative. The cogwheel suspended in the center of the scene is there a sign that persists, a sign wet by a persistent rain that falls lightly and makes everything damp, tears of a world, a contribution to a rotting degeneration of relationships between brothers, between nephew and uncle, between mother and son. On the wheel the fur is the sign of a quartered animal, it is the butcher’s shop of the soul, it is flowing blood, the same blood that recalls the red handkerchief with which Ophelia greets Laertes, the same blood sign that the comedians pass to each other with the court gathered for the show, a sign for the exterminating angel: Hamlet; because from Gonzalo’s story, King Claudius will show – at least in Hamlet’s eyes – the guilt of his regicide and will give way to the prince’s revenge. And this happens in the closed place of a press, and this is accompanied by metallic noise that smacks of torture of the mind and body. And then what about the death of Polonius, locked up in a box, a hidden presence, but revealed by a flute blowing into the water of a glass…. Eimuntas Nekrosius invents, invents that ice chandelier that brings to the stage the specter of King killed in an entrance by God on a pilgrimage that takes your breath away and combines fire and ice, candlelight and alabaster splendor that freezes the soul and encourages revenge. Nekrosius invents Ophelia’s death sentence in a light game of blind man’s buff that decrees her immersion in nothingness, he invents Nekrosius in the scene of the gravediggers and those skulls that roll noisily, he invents the Lithuanian demon in that last poisoned duel – wanted for revenge from Claudio – in which the rustling of swords indicates a bloody epilogue. And what about the drop that falls on the drum, blocked by the head of the king/ghost in an anguished silence, broken by the lament of Hamlet’s father, broken by the pain and anguish that every revenge brings with it in its fulfillment, in its leaving winners and losers dead on the ground, all equally defeated. And in the end it can only be a long, endless applause in a Teatro Grande in Brescia full of young people, a theater festival, a confirmation of the absolute genius of the Lithuanian Eimuntas Nekrosius.”

Hamletas 1 (1).mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/D033461B0413A59/Hamletas_1_(1).mkv https://nitro.download/view/9E37E1C6D742FA4/Hamletas_2_(1).mkv https://nitro.download/view/0206D655BD093B7/Hamletas_3_(1).mkv

Language(s):Lithuanian
Subtitles:English

The post Eimuntas Nekrošius – Hamletas AKA Hamlet (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders his king and takes the throne for himself.

Macbeth.1948.BDRIP.Kino.4K.576p.x264.FLAC.KJNU.mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/613E4D2ABCFB6DB/Macbeth.1948.BDRIP.Kino.4K.576p.x264.FLAC.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English SDH

The post Orson Welles – Macbeth (1948) first appeared on Cinema of the World.