At times it's a historical epic in which Polanski maintains an atmospheric and violent tone, but, frankly, there is almost no power in the Shakespearean soliloquies and the characters are often as flat as a sword blade. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Mar 11, 2025

At the outset, Jon Finch, who plays the title role, seems to lack the depth of emotion needed to play such a tragic figure... In the end, he has charged the role with a brooding force that is astonishing coming from an actor of 28 years.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 21, 2023

If it is not great Shakespeare, it is damned good moviemaking.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

There are excellences in this Macbeth that would be beyond tamer talents. The play has been translated from the stage to the screen with a movement, a rhythm and a visual impact unique to the medium.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

Without a shred of "modernization," Polanski has created a film which is as contemporary and as relevant as The Godfather.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

This is Shakespeare translated the way we would have liked it, in bold, virile terms. The pity is that Polanski's leads do not measure up to the production itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 21, 2023

The very degree to which Polanski has striven to supply his creation with realistic detail works against the stylization necessary for a faithful rendering of Shakespeare.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

[Its strength] is that it works concurrently on both a naturalistic and a psychological plane. Macbeth is a play of paradoxes, concerned with what is real and what is illusory, and Polanski has built his film on a correspondingly ambivalent structure.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

Polanski sacrifices the reverberation of anticipation and memory for the chills of immediate moment. But he gains in momentum, so that we never have the sense of coming to a halt at the Great Soliloquies, like a tourist bus before the monuments of a city.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

If the film isn't anything like a masterpiece, it is consistently interesting and full of a tension and excitement that should help the uninitiated through.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

That the feelings provoked by Polanski's film go considerably deeper than the feelings provoked by traditional stage productions seems, to this viewer, anyhow, to be a definite plus factor.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

Olivier? Kozintsev? We're looking right up, and indeed there is very much that is fine, if much cruder in the significant flow of movement Mr. Polanski obtains on the screen... all without much sacrifice of effectiveness in the text.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

An exciting and colorful Macbeth, staged with earthy ruggedness, that takes the screen by the throat with originality and daring.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

The images smother the words, and in the process is lost all the drama's sense of pace... This is underlined by the total inadequacy of the two chief performances, for which the director must take as much responsibility as Jon Finch and Francesca Annis.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

Polanski has approached the old play-into-film challenge with ease and a lack of self-consciousness. His Macbeth is neither stagy nor arty but sinewy. It is also very contemporary in feeling.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

Intense, compelling and weirdly beautiful, it rakes up horrors few of us would permit ourselves to see in Shakespeare's bloody tragedy.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

I can imagine a much better Macbeth, but in point of fact all the other productions I've seen have been much worse.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

Polanski's Macbeth seems more terrifying because he is presented to be a completely ordinary man turned into a tyrant.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

The language is flattened into conversation, and some of the best lines are simply tossed away. This may make Macbeth a bit more contemporary, but it also makes it ordinary.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

The important thing about putting Shakespeare on the screen is not to be intimidated by him. Roman Polanski's film of Macbeth succeeds splendidly when it follows this basic rule.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023