From the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, David Tennant, Catherine Tate and guests mark the life of William Shakespeare on the 400th anniversary of the playwright's death.
Ben Jonson
Anna's marriage is on the rocks after her husband John discovered she was having an affair with a much younger man. Confronted by her other half in the honeymoon suite of a Stratford-Upon-Avon hotel, Anna must try to save their marriage, deal with hapless hotel staff and come up with a plan to get through the experience. Unknown to either John or Anna, the suite’s bathroom is occupied by a semi-naked and comatose 21-year-old, who’s trying to sleep off a stag do.
When a 5-year-old girl falls from her father's apartment, her mother embarks on a quest for justice — and is put under the national spotlight.
Fran likes to think about dying. It brings sensation to her quiet life. When she makes the new guy at work laugh, it leads to more: a date, a slice of pie, a conversation, a spark. The only thing standing in their way is Fran herself.
Springtime in the French vineyards of Champagne. Patrick has gathered his oldest friends for his bachelor party. The trouble is, everyone hates his future wife. This could thus become one hellish weekend in gourmet paradise.
Amanda realizes that her perfect husband is having an affair. Instead of confronting him, she teams up with his husband's lover to understand what went wrong and win him back.
During a crack epidemic two narcotics agents hunting for a cop killer. Hoping for leads, Moran and Thorton pay off a junkie informant. To provide for his wife and son, Moran involves the stool pigeon in a deadly scheme. This causes the partners to come under the scrutiny of a suspicious internal affairs agent.
Searching for his brother, Ryota stows away on a boat belonging to a criminal alongside two other teenagers. The group shipwrecks on Letchi island and discover the Infant Island natives have been enslaved by a terrorist organization controlling a crustacean monster. Finding a sleeping Godzilla, they decide to awaken him to defeat the terrorists and liberate the natives.
At the height of the Oyo Empire, the ferocious Bashorun Ga'a became more powerful than the kings he enthroned, only to be undone by his own blood.
Sadie Walker is starting over in her hometown of Chesterfield, New York, following a series of major life disruptions that include leaving her law practice after losing her biggest case and no longer being engaged.
Gilles, who operates a money losing garage, teams up with his friends Max, who operates a scrap yard, and lawyer Xavier to open a brothel catering to women. They get the idea from Gilles' secretary Irma, a former prostitute. They are assisted in the implementation by Max's wife Juliette and Sabine who is mad for Gilles. Unfortunately Gilles has fallen for Florence the daughter of the conservative Prime Minister and his wife. When the Prime Minister tries to shut down the brothel Gilles decides to stand against him in the election.
Every parent's worst nightmare is just the beginning for Rachel's ordeal as in the aftermath of a tragic accident, she and her husband Anthony decide to move to the other side of the world to focus on their surviving twin son Elliot. What begins as a time of healing and isolation in the Finnish countryside turns into a desperate battle for the very soul of their son as an entity claiming to be his dead twin brother takes over Elliot — setting Rachel on a diabolical journey to unravel the horrible truth about her twin son.
Ettore has spent the last five years in jail for a robbery. Once out of prison, he has nowhere to go, his wife broke up with him and doesn’t want him to meet their little daughter who was born right before he was arrested. Alone and desperate, Ettore roams the streets of Rome and meets a strange old man, Nicola. He decides to take advantage of him and rob him. But after breaking into his house, Ettore realizes Nicola doesn’t have anything worth stealing and furthermore, the old man tells him a rather stranger thing: he affirms to be Santa Claus…
Widower Tom, on the recent passing of his wife Mary, uses his free bus pass to travel the length of Britain from John O'Groats in Caithness to Land's End in Cornwall, their shared birthplace, using only local buses. It's an incident-fuelled nostalgia trip and his encounters with local people make him a media phenomenon. Tom is totally unaware and to his surprise on arrival at Land’s End he’s greeted as a celebrity.
Estranged, quarreling brothers Carezza and Sorriso have to put aside their differences to reclaim their father's beloved dune buggy from predatory real estate developer Torsillo, with the help of beautiful circus performer Miriam, whose family business is threatened by Torsillo's enforcers.
Vice detective Bob Hightower finds his ex-wife murdered and daughter kidnapped by a cult. Frustrated by the botched official investigations, he quits the force and infiltrates the cult to hunt down the leader with the help of the cult’s only female victim escapee, Case Hardin.
After a pawn shop robbery goes askew, two criminals take refuge at a remote farmhouse to try to let the heat die down, but find something much more menacing.
A feature documentary set in Kigali, Rwanda, the epicenter of the genocide that left a million dead two decades earlier. The film follows eccentric retired Dartmouth Professor Emeritus, Andrew Garrod, as he mounts Romeo and Juliet with college students from both Hutu and Tutsi backgrounds. Hopes, expectations, pasts, personalities and cultures collide as opening night approaches.
Ballet performance by The Royal Ballet, recorded at Covent Garden, London, United Kingdom, July 1984.
An unexpected delay at the railway station sparks an unlikely relationship between two people.
The Graham Vicks production of FALSTAFF opened the new Covent Garden Royal Opera House, and was not to everybody's taste; the garish primary colours of the costumes. The staging is effective--the complicated counterpoint of the ensembles is reflected in unobtrusive blocking that keeps the vocal lines clear and separate, especially in the final fugue. Bryn Terfel's Falstaff is a memorable creation, self-mocking and self-aggrandising at the same time--so much so, in fact, that he almost does not need the vast prosthetic body he has to wear for the part. Desiree Rancatore is an admirably sweet-toned Nanetta; Bernadette Manca di Nissa an appropriately sardonic Mistress Quickly; Roberto Frontali as Ford, in his Act 2 scena, perfectly distils and parodies every jealousy aria ever written, including Verdi's own. Haitink's conducting is exemplary in the lyrical passages, gets almost everything out of the fast and furious comic sections.
A portrait of village life in South Thailand, home of retired Malay-Muslim members of the communist party of neighboring Malaysia. Recollections of the decades-long guerrilla war are interspersed with a Thai radio soap opera.
This hard-edged postmodern production of Giuseppe Verdi's haunting masterpiece brings the story of Shakespeare's bloody tragedy to vivid life, characterized by spine-tingling atmospherics and a triumphant debut by American baritone Thomas Hampson in the title role. This Zurich Opera House production also features a mesmerizing turn by Paoletta Marrocu as the beautiful, power-hungry Lady Macbeth, while striking sets and costumes further enhance the duality of the main character whose rise and fall mirror the darkest impulses of man. Replete with supernatural mystery, sexual tension, and violent power plays, this timeless story remains gripping and chilling for today's audiences and boasts some of the most astonishing music of Verdi's legendary body of work.
Claude D'Anna's film of Verdi's Macbeth is a gloomy affair, stressing the descent into madness of the principal villains. It's acted by the singers of the Decca recording of the opera (with two substitutions of actors standing in for singers) and the lip-synching is generally unobtrusive. The musical performance is superb, conducted by Riccardo Chailly with admirable fire, and sung by some of the leading lights of the opera stages of the 1980s. Shirley Verrett virtually owned the role of Lady Macbeth at the time, and she delivers a terrific performance, the voice equal to the role's wide register leaps and it's suffused with emotion, whether urging her husband on to murder or maddened by guilt in the Sleepwalking Scene. Leo Nucci's resonant Macbeth may lack the ultimate in vocal color and steadiness (his last notes of the great aria Pietà, rispetto, amore are wobbly) but he compensates with intensity in both singing and acting.
Shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria, Viola adopts a male disguise and enters the service of Duke Orsino, only to find herself part of a triangle of unrequited love. Meanwhile, in the household of the Countess Olivia, Sir Toby Belch and his unruly companions trick Olivia's strict and disapproving steward, Malvolio, into believing that she loves him.
The story behind the translation and performance of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in Klingon.
The ghost of the King of Denmark tells his son Hamlet to avenge his murder by killing the new king, Hamlet's uncle. Hamlet feigns madness, contemplates life and death, and seeks revenge. His uncle, fearing for his life, also devises plots to kill Hamlet. An historic BBC production taped on location in and around Kronborg castle in Elsinore (Denmark), in which the play is set.
The theme of Romeo and Juliet is the starting point from which the film spins a web of several stories. A love story between a boy and a girl whose families are Algerian: they are young, beautiful and they are trying to build a family and a social life in France. They love each other, and yet conflicts, family pressure and contradicting desires alternately tear them apart and unite them. The story of Romeo and Juliet, minus death.
A mockumentary examination of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy using "breaking news" style interviews and commentary.
Al Pacino's deeply-felt rumination on Shakespeare's significance and relevance to the modern world through interviews and an in-depth analysis of "Richard III."
King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and turns for support to his remaining daughters. But Goneril and Regan have no love for him and instead plot to take all his power from him. In a parallel, Lear's loyal courtier Gloucester favors his illegitimate son Edmund after being told lies about his faithful son Edgar. Madness and tragedy befall both ill-starred fathers.
Norwegian researcher Petter Amundsen claims to have deciphered a secret code hidden in legendary playwright William Shakespeare's works that reveals a map leading to the location of certain treasures. British Shakespearean scholar Robert Crumpton embarks on a mission to prove he is spectacularly wrong. (A remake of “Shakespeare: The Hidden Truth,” including new discoveries.)
Broadcast live on the Hallmark Hall of Fame series on NBC, a pair of divorced actors are brought together to participate in a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. Of course, the couple seem to act a great deal like the characters they play, and they must work together when mistaken identities get them mixed up with the mafia.
A young group of actors are preparing an updated version of Shakespeare's ROMEO & JULIET. Two boys perform the central roles - both of them struggling with their own questions of love alongside their roles on stage. And as rehearsals begin, reality soon starts to interfere with the play.
A provocative and ironic pamphleteering documentary about the making of Christoph Schlingensief’s Nazi-'Hamlet’ (2001). Both a media event and a form of political action Schlingensief let ex-neo-Nazis play themselves. His provocation in so-called Nazi-free Switzerland was not appreciated and when he added fuel to the flames by calling for the local political party SVP to be banned, his media offensive made front-page news far beyond Switzerland.
Kevin Spacey, Sam Mendes and the Bridge Project Company go on the road in NOW: in the Wings on a World Stage. In over 200 performances, and across 3 continents, Kevin and the troupe reveal some of the most intimate moments behind the scenes of their staging of Shakespeare's classic tragedy, "Richard III." Their story and experiences weave around, and reflect on, excerpts from the play from their various locations, from Epidaurus to Doha, and provides a great opportunity for those who have never experienced Spacey on stage to witness his immerse and captivating interpretation of Richard III. NOW chronicles the first collaboration between Spacey and Mendes since both won Academy Awards® for their work on American Beauty.
A banished hero of Rome allies with a sworn enemy to take his revenge on the city.