Hamlet (2025)

Yikes. I must have seen a dozen theatre and film adaptations of Hamlet, and I’ve never seen one that I felt got everything right. Olivier’s version is too staid, the Tony Richardson’s 60’s one too faithful, Maxine Peake and Benedict Cumberbatch did well in filmed versions of stage adaptations but with too much tinkering and not enough meat; the play’s the thing that should power any version of Hamlet, I like the modernised Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet too, but oddly the 1990 Mel Gibson one is probably the best to date. Fresh from his Lethal Weapon movies, Gibson was set against a cast of rather staid British thespians as the Elisnore Court, and it’s about as close as we’ve got to capturing the other-worldly clash between the tortured prince and his conflicted court…