100 Shakespeare films

Shakespeare's plays have inspired British Oscar-winners and spaghetti Westerns, Bollywood thrillers, and Soviet epics. Covering twenty plays, Daniel Rosenthal's selection of 100 Shakespeare films spans a century of cinema, from a silent Tempest (1907) to Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It (2006). Fifty of the films retain Shakespeare's language, among them Laurence Olivier's Henry V and Orson Welles's Othello. Alongside these are forty genre adaptations using modernized dialogue and re-imagined characters: Macbeth as a gangster in Joe Macbeth and Maqbool; Othello as a jazz pianist in All Night Long. Rosenthal also assesses twenty-five foreign-language titles. Presented alphabetically by Shakespeare play, each chapter begins with a synopsis, and the film essays explore cinematography, design, dialogue, music, and performance.