Interesting "modern" presentation of Shakespeare's classic tale of revenge.

57.250

Hamlet is interesting. Watered down aesthetics and a plain jane "X but in Y!" plot thesis are not.

Drawing on a moody and atmospheric visual style, Almereyda presents a Hamlet of our times: a disenchanted youth without roots and isolated by technology even as he uses it to express himself. The film cleverly relegates some of the conversations and monologues to phones and video, and displays the true genius of the play by its adaptability to the modern world. The film lags a bit in stretches, but the performances are solid, with Murray's Polonius and Schreiber's Laertes the standouts.

not an outstanding movie by any means, but its worth it if only to see modern everyday people speaking Shakespearean verse. Bill Murray is a definite stand out, as is Steve Zahn

I like the idea of modernizing Shakespeare plays on film (I liked the Romeo and Juliet version), but this movie left me bored. I probably wouldn't have watched it if Bill Murray hadn't been in it, but he didn't seem very into it. If nothing else Julia Stiles was really cute in this movie, and while that has no actual bearing on the movie itself it did help me make it to the end.

2000 was not a year in the 90s!

Kind of pretentious.

I do not know what Ethan Hawke was thinking when he did this movie. It was horrible and did not follow the story in many ways. The novel ideas though made it slightly better than completely pitiful.

Sorry Ethan...Bill isn't for you...

Hawke's not too bad

Decent telling of the Bard's greatest drama, though they get some stuff wrong. I saw this at Sundance and Ethan Hawke kicked the back of my chair and didn't apologize.

It's a decent attempt at making Hamlet more modern and some of it worked well. However nothing really stood out as very impressive either.

Hamlet is too committed an actor to let his indifferent, ironic superficiality shine through, yet he is too great a character not to. Here, perfectly, he stalks shelves stacked with DVDs and recites his pre-prepared soliloquy with a pre-prepared swagger, always soulful and never convincing. Some scenes are far weaker and Hawke is just fucking annoying, but this adaptation is still surprisingly incisive in grasping the play's overwhelming influence on and relevance to the postmodern world.

This was decent & a pretty good watch, my gripes are with the narration, which i found annoying (I'd rather have him taking to himself) & some of the monologues were a bit long, although it was terribly well written.

I wish I could like this version, because the cast is truly stellar, but the feeling of the film is too dry. It takes too much of the emotion out of the story to work any longer.

pretty close to a masterpiece. almereyda yeeeeeah