Between the release of "Henry V" in 1989 and "Love's Labour's Lost" in 2000, Kenneth Branagh directed eight major films in a wide variety of genres, ranging from film noir to horror to comedy, and continually startled audiences around the world with his audacious and energetic film style. Initially following in the footsteps of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, Branagh has placed himself among the small collection of actors who have transformed themselves into award-winning directors as well. In this, the first comprehensive English-language treatment of Branagh's feature films, Crowl...

Rated Outstanding in the 2004 edition of University Press Books Selected for Public and Secondary School Libraries

Samuel Crowl's "Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era" is the first thorough exploration of the fifteen major Shakespeare films released since the surprising success of Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V" (1989). Crowl presents the rich variety of these films in the long decade: between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The productions range from Hollywood-saturated films such as Franco Zeffirelli's "Hamlet" and...

Hamlet is the most often produced play in the western literary canon, and a fertile global source for film adaptation. Samuel Crowl, a noted scholar of Shakespeare on film, unpacks the process of adapting from text to screen through concentrating on two sharply contrasting film versions of Hamlet by Laurence Olivier (1948) and Kenneth Branagh (1996). The films' socio-political contexts are explored, and the importance of their screenplay, film score, setting, cinematography and editing examined.

Offering an analysis of two of the most important figures in the history of film...