Hamlet
Retail (£14.99) and DVD (£19.99) FilmFour Cert 12
This very Miramax Hamlet substitutes modern dress and New York skyscrapers for gloomy Danish castles, and corporate skulduggery for regal treachery, but maintains Shakespeare's dialogue right down to the "milords". It's hard not to laugh at first but once you get used to it, it works surprisingly well in a pared-down form, avoiding flash visuals, emphasising just how much of the brilliant dialogue has passed into the language and finding effective, unorthodox settings for its famous speeches. The performances, especially by woolly-hatted Hamlet Ethan Hawke, won't please everyone but if you've heard these lines being declaimed before, the flat intonation, some of it as thoughts in voiceover, has its own appeal. Besides, anyone who sets the "to sleep, perchance to dream" speech during a prowl in an all-night Blockbuster store, as Michael Almereyda does here, gets my vote. It's not the weirdest Hamlet - Aki Kaurismaki set his similarly corporate version, Hamlet Goes Business, in a rubber-duck factory - but it's further proof of how Shakespeare can be played about with and still come up trumps. Julia Stiles, so good in the Bard-derived 10 Things I Hate About You returns as a very hip Ophelia, throwing away Polaroids not posies and drowning in a swimming pool.
Cradle Will Rock
Rental Buena Vista Cert 15
It's a rare complaint, but there's almost too much ambition in Tim Robbins's Cradle Will Rock, a labour of love about a 1930s socialist musical originally directed by Orson Welles, but suppressed. In a tribute to Welles, it opens with a beautiful six-minute tracking shot, but too often gives you an overall hive of activity rather than focusing on a compelling story which prefigured McCarthy. But it pulses with life and argument and has excellent performances - especially from Emily Watson as a stagehand with acting ambitions and Bill Murray in a memorable turn as a ventriloquist who sees his career threatened by agit-prop theatre. It's frustrating that Robbins would have been a far better Welles than Angus MacFadyen, who entirely misses the great man's sonorous tones. But the director's control over this whirlwind of activity is impressive. For a film about theatre, it's admirably unstagy and, like The West Wing, it's expert at fast-paced dialogue on the hoof.
