Gamlet (Hamlet)

The Russians filmed Shakespeare's most famous tragedy to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the playwright's birth. Smoktoenovsky's Prince of Denmark is no vacillating dreamers but, like everything else in the film, muscular and volatile. The images, enriched by the dramatic Shostakovich music, are bold, sweeping and powerful with, for example, the Ghost a giant armour-clad figure who brings a palpable sense of terror with him. This Hamlet is a study in the sinister manipulations of medieval statecraft, played in an Elsinore that immures its inhabitants in a convincing fortress of stone and iron that requires large armies to penetrate it.