Really great and haunting. This is absolutely stunning on several levels - the cinematography and production design are straight up gorgeous and both deserve awards consideration. Justin Kurzel does a great job with building tension and staging each sequence and really gives this a very epic feel. The performances are across the board superb, with Michael Fassbender completely disappearing into this role and Marion Cotillard tackling Lady Macbeth with a bit more of a sympathetic edge than she's been portrayed in the past. Sean Harris is also fantastic as Macduff. My biggest complaint here is actually the dialogue. I know that's a horrible thing to say because of how iconic the text is, but it takes a while to really get into a groove where you fully understand what is going on - and also because most of the actors have fully committed to using thick Scottish accents and mumble a good portion of what they are saying I feel like a lot went over my head. I would be eager to rewatch this with subtitles because almost every other aspect of the movie is superb. I did think the screenwriters did a good job of streamlining the story a bit as it moves at a very quick pace. Also it has a fantastic musical score. A-

This won't find a mainstream audience though - about 10-15 people walked out of the screening I was at.

This is an atmospheric and ferocious interpretation of William Shakespeare's tragedy of ambition and tyranny in Scotland. It instantly earns a prestigious place alongside the essential versions by Orson Welles and Roman Polanski. After a decisive victory in a brutal civil war, general and nobleman Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) receives a prophecy from witches who emerge from and vanish into the mist: he is fated to replace the benevolent Duncan (David Thewlis) as king. Aided by his calculating wife (Marion Cotillard), Macbeth sets in motion a violent chain of events to claim the throne. He and his lady are then forced to contend with anxiety and guilt as newly created enemies gather to end their volatile reign.

As with any cinematic adaptation of the Bard, this particular film condenses and reshapes the original text, but no alteration registers as sacrilegious, and a few are provocative and enriching: for instance, a wistful, nearly silent opening sequence in which Macbeth and his wife hold a funeral for their own child plants a seed of domestic trauma which grows through every subsequent scene.

Director Justin Kurzel, whose directorial debut, the true-crime yarn The Snowtown Murders, surely seared the mind of anyone who saw it, grounds the play's twisty treachery in a realistic vision of period Scotland. He envisions it as a hard and vivid place of blood, foliage, soil, and wind far from any stage artifice, culminating in an epic sword fight adjacent to the red-inferno glow of a forest fire. Macbeth has never felt so historical and infused with human frailty and the harsh natural world on screen. And the lead performances are spellbinding: Fassbender plays the title character as a clenched fist of a man with tantalizing flashes of political charisma and feral insanity while Cotillard creates a mournful Lady Macbeth, an intelligent and aching woman in a brutal place whose conspiring is always just one step ahead of despondency. Both nicely internalize the Elizabethan verse, delivering it as if it were coming to them in the heat of the moment. They whisperingly implore and abruptly snarl rather than grandly recite.

Hail Macbeth, indeed.

A

I have read "Macbeth", I love it, yet I was never as grateful for subtitles in my life as I was in this screening. Good God.

Is it the thick accents coupled with the fact that it is Shakespeare or more just the accent side? Or, I should clarify, a thick Scottish accent is very hard for me to decipher as an American-English speaker. Especially if it is that of the working class or, maybe in this case, Scottish accent with early modern English words.

Really excited to see this.

I think this is both.

Ahhh, a thread where movie hipsters cum.

I thought this was an absolute bore. And Macbeth's dive into madness was rushed IMHO. I never bought into it and whatever the hell was going on with Lady Macbeth.

I guess you don't like the play then?

I like the play. Not a fan of this adaptation. It looked great at parts though.

This is definitely a film you have to be in a certain mood to watch just to soak it all in, and I'm glad I waited. From a visual standpoint alone it's a stunner and it's even quite epic at times, especially during the battle sequences. Fassbender/Cotillard give such riveting performances that everytime they were onscreen I was instantly captivated, but it is a shame that everything else around them is so uninteresting with the exception of Sean Harris who is also fantastic here. I really can't wait to see what this director does with Assassin's Creed, but at the very least I know it will look AMAZING.