Tamara Shepherd points out that the Rotten Tomatoes website is ‘one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Internet, with 60-120 million page views per day’ which makes it an important player in the creation of contemporary cultural capital (Shepherd, ‘Rotten Tomatoes in the Field of Popular Cultural Production’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 18.2 (2009): 26-44). Both scholarly and popular criticism about the website have emphasised the influence of online reviews in the digital age. It is to say that as teachers of digitally literate students, the way films are represented online is of interest. This is not to say that online reviews are always accurate. One example of this is the Franco Zeffirelli adaptation from 1990 (starring Mel Gibson and Glen Close) which picked up two Academy Award nominations but received mixed reviews from critics and audiences, and few scholarly citations. The film is also representative of the differences in reception by critics/audiences/academics, particularly in relationship to Shakespeare adaptations of the late 20th century.

Michael Almereyda’s 2000 adaptation of the play arguably gave its audience a new Hamlet. If I were a high-school English teacher, this is the Hamlet that I would want to show my students.Hamlet as the late Harold Bloom described it ‘gave its audience a new Shakespeare’ (Bloom, The Invention of the Human 1998, 383). Ethan Hawke does a fantastic job in the role, giving us the brooding, confused, lovesick, and ultimately self-destructive adolescent that Shakespeare intended. But what I loved most about this movie was how it departed from the usual staging conventions (medieval costume, stone castles) to get at the heart of what the play is really about: a kid coming home on a college break and discovering that his uncle has murdered his father and is having sex with his mother. I especially enjoyed Bill Murray as Polonius: his performance was all the more delightful because of the necessity of restraining his comic genius here he appears always on the edge of cracking a joke, and of course doesn't, adding even more tension to an already extremely taught production. Another wonderful thing about the Bard is how his drama seems to elevate any actor willing to take on the challenge. This beautiful, moody, stylish adaptation of his greatest play is no exception. Nearly four hundred years after his death, Shakespeare continues to be the best screenwriter in the English language.

Hamlet full movie 2000