When I was 16, for a high school English assignment I composed a short play titled Deconstructing Hamlet, made up entirely of decontextualised quotes from Shakespeare’s play, all placed in conflicting dialogue with each other. It probably wasn’t as clever as I thought at the time, but it was early proof to me of the Danish tragedy’s endless adaptability – a virtue that the film industry has amply seized upon over the past century or so. Even with that in mind, Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s ingenious documentary Grand Theft Hamlet, in cinemas next month (and on Mubi early next year), stretches the point further than most, examining a lockdown staging of the play within the online digital realm of Grand Theft Auto, emerging as a strangely moving testament to the communal comforts of gaming and performance alike.
Hamlet has been filmed so frequently that it has earned something of a hiatus. The last major “straight” version on screen was Michael Almereyda’s 2000 version (on Apple TV+), with a moody Ethan Hawke as the procrastinating prince out for revenge on his elders. A modern-dress interpretation awash in glossy Y2K styling, it’s now pretty much a period piece capturing what seemed cool at the turn of the century. Hawke is rather good, but it’s undeniably try-hard, while its fashioning of Hamlet as a critique of corporate corruption, with Claudius as the CEO of “Denmark Corp”, had already been better done by Akira Kurosawa in his nasty, spiralling 1960 neo-noir The Bad Sleep Well (BFI Player).
Almereyda’s film capped off a busy decade for Hamlet in cinemas, and a veritable heyday at the time for English teachers with VHS players. Franco Zeffirelli’s scowling, action-oriented 1990 version sheared the text and amped up the Oedipal vibes by casting nine-years-apart Mel Gibson and Glenn Close as Hamlet and Gertrude. (Oddly, it’s only available on physical media these days.) Six years later, Kenneth Branagh’s extravagant four-hour version won the purists’ vote by leaving the play unabridged, but showed real cinematic verve with its heightened Victorian aesthetic and dizzy long takes in Panavision. It remains Branagh’s best film – the main course to his minor, enjoyable comedy In the Bleak Midwinter, about a dishevelled community Christmas staging of Hamlet, released the year before.
Laurence Oliver, unsurprisingly, remains the name principally associated with Hamlet on screen: his handsomely classical 1948 version won the best picture Oscar – the first non-American film, and still the only Shakespearean adaptation, to do so – and his agonised, Oscar-winning portrayal of the prince is as good as any you’ll see, though the film itself feels a little stiff alongside Olivier’s more elaborate cinematic visions for Henry V and Richard III. Comparatively underrated is Tony Richardson’s severe, starkly minimalist 1969 version with a tremendous Nicol Williamson, plus a surprisingly effective Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia. Meanwhile, the Bard’s words sound just fine in Russian in Grigori Kozintsev’s impressively sweeping, outdoor-heavy 1964 version (Shakespeare Network), though the original Shostakovich score is perhaps the main draw.
Veering away from the text, Robert Eggers delved back to the Hamlet-inspiring Norse legend of Amleth for his magnificently louring, violent Viking epic The Northman (2022), finding its own kind of poetry in visceral grunts. Disney’s The Lion King, of course, works from the bare skeleton of Hamlet, with significant diversions: perhaps if Shakespeare’s prince had been taught Hakuna Matata, things might have turned out better for him. Claire McCarthy’s 2018 Ophelia (BBC iPlayer) nobly attempted a feminist reorientation of the play around its most underwritten character, played by a stoic Daisy Ridley, but its empowerment angle is awfully heavy-handed.
Finally, Tom Stoppard’s antic 1990 film of his play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead remains the cleverest comic riff on material not noted for its abundance of laughs, though it still feels resolutely stagebound. Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942; Internet Archive) has precious little to do with Shakespeare, but this frenzied second world war farce about a theatre company tackling Shakespeare in Nazi-occupied Warsaw remains the funniest work in all Hamlet-adjacent cinema.
All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified.
Also new on streaming and DVD
The Wild Robot A well-timed VOD release as the holidays approach, this elegant, highly affecting environmental fable about a shipwrecked android finding her place in nature is as sophisticated a major studio animation as any we’ve seen in years – and maybe a DreamWorks peak.
Cuckoo True to its title, Tilman Singer’s thoroughly delirious horror comedy makes not a lick of sense as it plunges a jittery American teenager (Hunter Schafer) into a suspiciously tranquil Alpine retreat: every obstacle is a new logical puzzler. But its stylish and gleefully absurd, with Dan Stevens having a whale of a time on villain duty.
Watership Down (BFI) If your children are made of sturdier stuff, meanwhile, the BFI’s immaculate new 4K restoration of Martin Rosen’s viscerally grownup 1978 cartoon about exile, warfare and the circle of life – all in the realm of some very resilient rabbits – is an essential, exquisite rite of passage.
