Opens: August 1
Genre: Costume Drama
Duration: 114 minutes

The greatest of screen Hamlets is the 1964 film by Grigori Kozintsev, a subversive critique of the Soviet Union so dynamic, so inspiringly translated into the visual language of cinema, that beside it, all others pale, including Olivier’s.

After this, everyone else should have either given up (hello Branagh and Zeffirelli), or tackled the story from a radical new angle, which is indeed what some filmmakers did. Disney’s The Lion King had the commercial chutzpah to give the tragedy a happy ending, but the most artistically bold retake was Tom Stoppard’s film of his own absurdist stage play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which famously turned the story inside out to focus on two minor characters.

That’s also the approach taken to this handsome international production by the Australian director Claire McCarthy and writer Semi Chellas, adapting a novel by Lisa Klein in which the young Hamlet’s thinly sketched female love interest is filled out and given agency as the main character. A bit too much filling out, I’d suggest, as some of the new plot developments are more like bizarre distractions, sometimes borrowed from...