The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

This masterpiece, filled with sound and fury (and magnificent pictures), signifying director/screenplay adaptor Joel Coen's first movie without his brother Ethan, has earned, as of this writing, fifteen wins and 108 nominations. 

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand (the latter married to Joel Coen since 1984) splendidly lead the cast as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and are supported by, among others, Brendan Gleeson as King Duncan, Corey Hawkins as Macduff, and Stephen Root as Porter. Shout out to Kathryn Hunter who plays all three witches, speaking in a satanic gravelly voice and bending and twisting her body into seemingly impossible shapes without any special effects added.

And oh, the photography! Black and white, beautifully framed, stark images, filmed almost exclusively on soundstages, are to the credit of both director of photography Bruno Delbonnel and Coen, who scripted the adaptation of William Shakespeare's play. Forty of the wins and nominations are for the cinematography alone. I had to count. Some of them are from awards given to cinematographers by cinematographers. Here is an article about the cinematography. See also my running list of selected wins and nominations, sorted by title.

Carter Burwell's soundtrack, available on Apple Music has a lot of dialogue in it so, although it's good, I could not use it well while writing (who among us can compose sentences while listening to words?).

In all of Joel Coen's previous films with his brother Ethan, they used the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes for their work as editors. In this, Joel's editorial pseudonym is Reginald Jaynes.

Joel Coen was last blogged for co-directing and co-writing (with Ethan) The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Washington for acting in Roman J. Israel, Esq., McDormand for The French Dispatch, Gleeson for Suffragette, Hawkins for In the Heights, Root for On the Basis of Sex, Delbonnel for shooting Darkest Hour, and Burwell for scoring The Good Liar. Hunter, better known for her theatre work, is covered in this article.

Perhaps many of Rotten Tomatoes' audience members, averaging an idiotic 77%, hated English class, while its critics were in Advanced Placement, and grade the movie 93.

If you, too, hated English class, this will not move you. But if you, like I, wish you had paid better attention then, you can read the closed captions now to follow Shakespeare's tragedy of ambition and murder. Jack is a retired high school English teacher and Macbeth was among his oft-repeated subjects, so he was my live Cliff's Notes, tutoring me as we watched it on Apple TV March 1.