- Search:
- Time Out worldwide
- Web

Film

What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases

William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996)

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Average user rating

1 review

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Leone-style face-off between gun-toting gangs at a gas station: outright street-warfare is evidently imminent, which presents something of a problem for young Montague when, at an absurdly extravagant costume ball thrown at the Capulets' mansion, he falls head over heels for Juliet. So starts WS's Romeo & Juliet. Baz Luhrmann's gleefully cinematic version of the play is so relentlessly inventive and innovative, it takes 20 minutes to get a grasp on how appropriate is his approach to the material. Bravely (but sensibly) sticking with the original dialogue, Luhrmann makes the central element of his audacious adaptation visual: as the camera races wildly around, or rests on luminous close-ups and ornate tableaux, the striking sets, costumes, characters, the colours and compositions serve perfectly to evoke the forces of wealth and poverty, love and hate, power and pride, prejudice and superstition that infest the chaotically sprawling post-punk, post-industrial, multi-ethnic world of millennial Verona (Mexico City and Vera Cruz, heavily made over). Fine as the rest of the cast is, it's DiCaprio and Danes - vulnerable, innocent, impassioned and beautiful, both of them - who steal the honours.

Author: GA

Time Out Film Guide

Email Tweet Share

User reviews of this film

Albert said...

Posted on May 03 2009 21:45 I hated this version . The one good performance is Pete Posthethwaite as Friar Laurence.

Report as inappropriate