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This weekend, Sony Pictures Classics launches Alex Holmes’ Toronto ’18 premiere Maiden. The company was bullish about the doc’s prospects at the title’s New York premiere hosted by awards maven Peggy Siegal.

IFC Films is heading out with a day and date release of Ophelia, a modern-language re-imagining of Hamlet told from Ophelia’s Pov, starring Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts and Clive Owen. Greenwich Entertainment is opening Locarno Film Festival prize-winner Three Peaks, looking to take advantage of the dearth of new dramas, while KimStim is bowing the provocative social satire The Plagiarists in New York.

Other limited releases heading to theaters this weekend include Euphoria with Alicia Vikander, Eva Green and Charlotte Rampling via Freestyle Releasing and Lionsgate Home Entertainment as well as Vertical Entertainment’s The Last Whistle. ArtAffects, meanwhile, is opening its faith-centered The Other Side Of Heaven 2: Fire of Faith in over two hundred locations Friday.

Tom Hiddleston is preparing to take Broadway by storm later this summer.

The 38-year-old actor is starring in the revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, which follows the story of the marriage between Robert (Hiddleston) and Emma (Zawe Ashton) as well as Emma’s affair with Robert’s friend Jerry (Charlie Cox).

The play first premiered in London at the National Theatre in 1978 and made its Broadway debut in 1980. A 2013 revival took place with Rafe Spall and Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, who are married in real life.

Performances for Hiddleston’s revival begin August 14 at the Bernard B. Jacobs...

Tom Hiddleston will make his Broadway debut this summer in a revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. Co-starring, also in their Broadway debuts, will be Charlie Cox (Daredevil) and Zawe Ashton (Velvet Buzzsaw).

Directed and produced by Jamie Lloyd, Betrayal will begin performances Aug. 14 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, with an official opening set for Sept. 5. The engagement is limited to 17 weeks.

The production is a partnership between The Jamie Lloyd Company and the Ambassador Theatre Group. The Broadway staging follows an earlier extended run in London’s West End.

Joining the three stars in the Broadway production will be Eddie Arnold as the Waiter.

“Watching this remarkable cast bring new life to Harold Pinter’s greatest work has been one of the most gratifying and exciting experiences of my life in the theater,” said Jamie Lloyd in a statement. “I am thrilled that American audiences will have the...

Steven Berkoff is no stranger to the limelight. At 81 the actor, playwright and theatre director shows no sign of slowing down. Currently he is working on a one man, one act play based on the recent #MeToo allegations against disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. But his most recent film, a perilous journey through some of Shakespeare’s most notorious creations, shows that there is much more for the ‘enfant terrible’ still to say.

This confrontational aspect is crucial to the man’s work. Indeed, it has served him well enough to earn him the nick name of one of the ‘bad boys of British theatre’, a moniker which endeared him to Hollywood casting agents in the ’70s and ’80s. On screen he has fought James Bond, John Rambo and Axel Foley, on stage he has brought his brash physicality to many of the great roles, notably his work adapting Shakespeare.

Ophelia is one of the most maligned characters in literary history. It’s not entirely her fault — the tragic heroine of Hamlet suffers from being not much of a heroine, but rather a cipher for the purity and virtue of women and all that will befall them when that innocence is corrupted by the world. […]

The post ‘Ophelia’ Director Claire McCarthy on Turning Madness and the Male Gaze On its Head [Interview] appeared first on /Film.

A creative re-imagining of Denmark’s most famous royalty yarn, “Ophelia” does more than just provide new insight into “Hamlet,” it also contextualizes the 400+ year-old play via characters that seem more alive now than ever before. An origin story of sorts, “Ophelia” delves into the eponymous character’s childhood and adolescence at court, using elements from Shakespeare’s play along with a creative reevaluation of the young woman as an active agent of change within the narrative.

Continue reading ‘Ophelia’ Breathes New Life Into The Classic Tale Of ‘Hamlet’ With A Beautiful Performance From Daisy Ridley [Review] at The Playlist.

We’ve had “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” and “Fortinbras Gets Drunk,” and now there’s “Ophelia,” an intelligent and gorgeous spin on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from the point of view of the melancholy prince’s beloved.

“Hamlet” of course has its share of memorable characters — recall the bit player who claimed that the play was about a grave digger who meets a prince — but this provocative adaptation of Lisa Klein’s novel gives an oft-maligned character purpose and agency. It is not betrayal and madness that bewitches this Ophelia but toxic masculinity.

Director Claire McCarthy (“The Waiting City”) and adapter Semi Chellas (“Mad Men”) give us an Elsinore Castle and its court that’s as handsomely mounted as any number of straightforward Shakespearean adaptations, but they cleverly tweak the proceedings to make us reexamine key moments from an entirely different angle.

Also Read: 'Straight Up' Film Review:...

New interpretations of classic literary characters need to blaze a creative path in order to justify the alternate look. Filmmakers have been doing this with William Shakespeare’s plays for decades, and even in the past few decades, we’ve seen numerous takes. From the brash changes of 10 Things I Hate About You and O to the more subtle switches of the most recent take on Macbeth, there’s always a new avenue to explore. This week, Ophelia does that with Hamlet, mainly by changing the protagonist. Having debuted at the Sundance Film Festival back in 2018, it’s been a long road for the flick, but it does finally hit theaters in a few days, hoping to compel with its shift in focus. The film is, as mentioned above, at its core a re-imagining of the classic Shakespeare story Hamlet, just from a new point of view. This time, it...

Daisy Ridley's Ophelia reimagines Hamlet as a parable for today, and turns a great tragedy into a disappointing soap opera.

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To be or not to be. That is the question that has fascinated and bedeviled centuries of theatergoers and one eternally waffling prince. It is also the conundrum faced by any attempts to reinterpret or revisit William Shakespeare’s hallowed Hamlet text from a different vantage. Set in the medieval—if a stage director is so inclined—Danish castle of Elsinore, Hamlet’s great halls are populated by a dozen ambiguous and mostly tragic players. None more so than Ophelia. The doomed waif of generations of male writers’ admiring pity, she is almost always cast as the poor dear driven to madness and suicide due to the vacillating whims of a poor excuse for a hero. It’s a beautiful role derived from a different time and different set of values.

A shift in point of view reframes Shakespeare’s tragedy but the novelty wears off instantaneously with bizarre additions and a lack of emotional engagement

If a producer cornered me in an elevator and pitched “Hamlet, but from Ophelia’s point of view, and we’ve got Daisy Ridley in the lead”, I’d sell everything I had to invest. And I’d probably make a killing, as Claire McCarthy’s Ophelia is going to cut into one heck of a trailer. But to thine own self one must be true.

Related: The Miseducation of Cameron Post review – prayers answered with conversion therapy drama...

Remember how Kenneth Branagh helped lead a Shakespearean revival in the 1990s? We had his Henry V, Hamlet, and Much Ado About Nothing, plus a stylish Romeo + Juliet, a more stark Hamlet starring Mel Gibson, Othello (which co-starred Branagh as Iago), Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and that's just the literal adaptations.

There was also the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love and modernized versions of Bard classics with the Julia Stiles tandem of 10 Things I Hate About You and O.

But in the 21st Century, we haven't seen nearly as much light breaking through yonder window. There will be a King Lear next year, and that's exciting and depressing for alternate reasons, and we're now just a couple of years away from an animated Shakespeare.

The Hollywood Reporter says that James McAvoy and Emily Blunt - who I'd pay to see play the star-cross'd lovers in a live action...

Paul Scofield, the imperious British actor of stage and screen who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, died Wednesday; he was 86. Scofield, who passed away at a hospital near his home in southern England, had been suffering from leukemia. Scofield began his acting career onstage, where it would always be centered, and he found his first successes in taking on a variety of Shakespearean roles during and after World War II. His towering presence and amazing performances quickly drew comparison to fellow thespian Laurence Olivier. While continuing his theater work, Scofield began appearing in a handful of films in the 1950s and early 1960s, most notably the John Frankenheimer thriller The Train. In fact, he had only three films to his credit when he was asked to reprise his celebrated role as Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film adaptation of A Man for All Seasons, directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Fred Zinnemann. The story of King Henry VIII's Chancellor of England, who refused to go along with the monarch's break from the Roman Catholic Church and was executed for it, the film was a sumptuous adaptation of the Robert Bolt play and a critical and commercial success, winning six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director and Actor for Scofield.

Despite his acclaimed Oscar success, the actor continued to work mainly in the theater, with occasional forays into cinema, primarily in stage-to-film adaptations; notable films in the 1970s included Peter Brook's version of King Lear and Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance opposite Katharine Hepburn. Scofield found the second role of a lifetime in the stage production of Amadeus, where he played the tortured and envious composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham would win an Oscar for the role in the 1984 film). Considered reclusive, a trait he would deny in many interviews, he hand-picked his film roles very carefully, appearing in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, and he received a second Oscar nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actor, for Robert Redford's Quiz Show. His last major film role was in 1996's The Crucible, which won him his third BAFTA award. Scofield is survived by his wife, the actress Joy Parker, whom he married in 1943, and their two children, Martin and Sarah. --Mark Englehart, IMDb staff...

Actor Alan Bates, who came to fame as one of British cinema's "angry young men" of the 60s and whose heralded stage and screen career was marked by a love of acting as opposed to fame, died Saturday night in London after a long battle with cancer; he was 69. Educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Bates indeed helped launch the genre of angry young men plays by starring in John Osbourne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, which started him on a stage career that was marked by innumerable roles created by classic playwrights. His first major film role in 1960 was opposite none other than Laurence Olivier in Osbourne's The Entertainer, in which Bates and a young Albert Finney played the sons of Olivier's shabby vaudevillian. Roles in Whistle Down the Wind, A Kind of Loving and The Running Man followed, but it was Bates' two successive performances in Zorba the Greek and Georgy Girl that helped make him a film star; the former film, in which he played a repressed Englishman opposite Anthony Quinn's life-affirming Zorba, received a Best Picture nomination. Bates himself received a Best Actor nomination for John Frankenheimer's The Fixer (1968), and a year later earned more fame and a bit of notoriety for Ken Russell's erotic adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, in which he wrestled naked with Oliver Reed. Notable film roles also included Far From the Madding Crowd, An Unmarried Woman, The Rose and his turn as Claudius in Mel Gibson's Hamlet. Bates also won a Tony award in 2002 for Turgenev's Fortune's Fool and was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1995 and knighted last year. Most recently, Bates was seen onscreen in the thriller The Sum of All Fears, Robert Altman's Oscar-winning Gosford Park and this year's drama The Statement. Bates, whose son Tristan died in 1990 and wife Victoria Ford died in 1992, is survived by two brothers, son Benedick, and a granddaughter. --Prepared by IMDb staff...

Mel Gibson's Icon Productions company have signed a two-year, first-look deal with Twentieth Century Fox. Under the terms of Icon's new deal with Fox, Gibson will star in at least one picture for the studio, according to Fox Filmed Entertainment chairmen Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos. Icon productions have included We Were Soldiers, What Women Want, Payback, Maverick and Hamlet, all starring Gibson, and The Man Without A Face and Braveheart, which he also directed. A statement from Gibson and partner Bruce Davey says, "Our relationship with Twentieth Century Fox dates back to the international release of Braveheart, and we have been trying to work together again over the years. The partnership at Fox will allow Icon to continue our growth in all areas of the entertainment business."...