The Tragedy of Macbeth

In his first film without his brother Ethan, Joel Coen creates an immersive and nightmarish black-and-white world that serves as the perfect setting for Shakespeare’s grand Scottish tragedy. Denzel Washington is the ambitious Thane of Cawdor, who—egged on by his craven, even more ambitious wife (a riveting Frances McDormand)—contemplates, and then does, the unthinkable: killing the King and usurping his crown. On par with the great acting are the cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel and the production designs of Stefan Dechant. Together, Coen and his team have created images it is impossible to banish from the memory.

‘Coen very much approaches the material as the visual obsessive he is. The diaphanous white fog, the cawing black birds, the witch who looks like a depraved Joan of Arc—it all has the entranced clarity of a nightmare. The surprise, at least to me (and I say this as a true believer in the Coen brothers’ aesthetic, even though I only like about half their films), is how sensual and ingenious and expressive and enveloping the film’s images are.’—Owen Gleiberman, Variety