The language of shadows …

… The Tragedy of Macbeth by Joel Coen (dir) - review by Peter Conrad. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A director who films Shakespeare must make us privy to those forbidden sights, and Joel Coen in The Tragedy of Macbethdocuments Duncan’s murder in close-up, as Macbeth sits on the old man’s bed, pensively studies him for a while as he sleeps, then stops his mouth with one hand and thrusts a dagger into his throat with the other. Yet this kind of flagrant exposure is not what makes Coen’s visual adaptation of a verbal drama so powerful. His film, photographed in inky black and luminous white by Bruno Delbonnel, is a chromatic poem which re-creates the mysterious kindling of light in darkness that both thrilled and perturbed audiences when cinema was an occult new invention.