Review: Justin Kurzel's Bloody, Muddy, Mighty 'Macbeth' Starring Michael Fassbender And Marion Cotillard

This is a reprint of our review from the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Brooding, dense, and consistently magnificent to an almost self-defeating degree, Justin Kurzel's "Macbeth" is a bloody, muddy, mighty adaptation of one of Shakespeare's mightiest plays. Kurzel, whose only previous film, the excellent but confined "Snowtown" gave us no real idea that he was capable of such tectonic gravitas, does not offer a reinterpretation of the text so much as a head-first plunge into its depths, dredging up whole chunks of Shakespeare's verse and raising them aloft like he's ripping the beating heart from a mastodon. The words are honored almost as written, but the images, which must surely see "True Detective" cinematographer Adam Arkapaw come barreling into the awards race, are where Kurzel tells the story, and are where he makes his most significant and inventive decisions.

Aided by intensely committed performances from a uniformly brilliant cast, all fielding...