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Roman Polanski's notoriously violent film of Shakespeare's notorious "Scottish play" doesn't quite satisfy as it should. His bleak modernist interpretation is ultimately just too limiting, still it's certainly a bravura piece of moviemaking and can be best appreciated as such. After all, this is not really Shakespeare per se but a Polanski film: the prevailing themes of witchcraft, rampant paranoia, and finally triumphant evil pick up right where ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968) left off. And life is certainly solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short in this movie -- Shakespeare's poetry takes a backseat to a surfeit of excruciatingly detailed mutilations with plenty of blades slashing through jugular veins, culminating in a truly epic decapitation. This MACBETH is a relentless homicidal debauch: Polanski displays the same technical virtuosity and gruesome inventiveness in staging the numerous murders here as he did in REPULSION (1965). All of Shakespeare's famous metaphors (e.g., `is this a dagger I see before me?') are garishly literalized and deliberately engineered as part of an escalating series of spectacular, cathartic, bloodier-than-hell set-pieces.

Visually, the film is rich and vivid: the forbidding images of rain-swept moors and twilit horizons possess a spellbinding primeval quality. And there are a few brilliant, inspired moments such as when our murderous Scot, whilst lying in his bed-chamber, broods "I am stepped in blood so far..." and the whole room is bathed in an eerie crimson light. But the scene that truly stands out is when he visits the witches in their lair and is shown his fate: it's a gorgeous, thrilling, and strikingly imaginative surrealist reverie, reminiscent of Buñuel's 'magical realism.' The actors, nearly all British stage pros, are solid and reliable. As Macbeth, morose, dark-eyed Jon Finch is really quite good -- and he certainly does have the diction for the role. But Francesca Annis' sickly nymphet Lady Macbeth is a glaring (and oh-so-characteristic) lapse in judgement on the director's part. Weak-voiced, pasty-faced, and generally irritating, this petulant, saucer-eyed little urchin has neither the skill nor the presence to adequately bring off one of Shakespeare's most formidable women. Annis' feeble performance renders the basic psychological premise of the play -- Lady Macbeth's manipulation of her husband to fulfill her delusions of grandeur -- unconvincing to say the least. Finch just looks uncomfortably stricken while Annis acts coy and childish.

All in all, Polanski's MACBETH is a decidedly thorny piece of work: since it was his first film following the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and friends by members of the Charles Manson cult, he seems to have had too much to prove here. He makes Banquo (Martin Shaw) Macbeth's rival and presents Ross (John Stride) as the play's eternal villain -- the faceless, blandly smiling Machiavellian 'company man' who shifts his allegiance as it suits him, crawling in and out of political woodwork at will. And by dispensing with the Bard's customary knot-tying closing speech and ending instead with an abrupt silent scene suggesting basically that the cycle of treachery and murder will spiral forever through the ages, Polanski seems to overstate his case.

In the third and final film of his celebrated TROIS COULEURS trilogy, Krzysztof Kieslowski demonstrates how all persons, whether they know it or not, are connected by a principle of universal 'fraternité.' Just as THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VÉRONIQUE (1991) had dealt with the parallel lives of two identical women on either side of the Iron Curtain, RED deals with the parallel lives of an old man and a young man. An elderly retired judge, Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant), spends his days spying and eavesdropping on his neighbors with an arsenal of surveillance equipment. His malaise and dissatisfaction with life is the result of a divided spirit that is, either in whole or in part, restored by his Platonic relationship with a young French fashion model, Valentine (Irène Jacob). The film's general themes seem somewhat analogous to those in Bernardo Bertolucci and Alberto Moravia's THE CONFORMIST (1970), which also starred Trintignant, and used chronological dislocations of life experience to mirror the protagonist's dislocation of identity, offering them as pieces in the psychological puzzle of how a man comes to be what he is.

Kern's inability to reconcile with his past and get on with his present life may be a metaphor for the inability of Europe as a whole to deal with its history since World War II and confront its current situation. Similarly, his need for distractions and deliberate sublimation of personal guilt and disappointment in an obsessive voyeuristic interest with the lives of those around him may also be a reflection of how modern communications technology has altered human behavior and ways in which people perceive themselves and the world around him. Historically, it may express Wim Wenders' view that `the Americans have colonized our subconscious' as well as the broader phenomena of an effective colonization of people's lives by those of people whom they have never met through the omnipresence and pervasiveness of mass media. And so, Marshall McLuhan's 'global village' has resulted in a concomitant alienation of the individual from his fellows and of the individual from his sense of sovereign identity.

The catalyst in Kern's life is, of course, Valentine. Like Goethe's Faust, Kern ultimately abandons the pursuit of forbidden knowledge for the redeeming love of a woman. Her name, Valentine, connotes love and human companionship and, throughout the course of the film, that is what she offers him. Indeed, her life is perhaps even more of a mystery than Kern's, perhaps because she is still young and has not acquired enough of a personal history yet. Valentine's problem is that she does not have an autonomous identity of her own. As a fashion and advertising model, she is required to project to others an image of their own narcissism.

Valentine's growing self-awareness is measured in the images she constantly sees of herself like the fashion-layout photographs and the billboard. However, these are not 'true images' of herself in the sense that they have been determined by the will of others. Her increased fascination with her own face as reflected in car windows signalizes an internal change. And in the end, the artfully constructed mirror image of herself in the billboard -- an encounter with her conscious self and her double -- becomes transformed into an actual image of herself as she really is in a real-life situation by the final shot of the film. She has evolved from her former passive status as an opaque photographic object to a new serene kind of subjectivity and solipsism.

This is all well and fine but Kieslowski's film is not entirely convincing. Indeed, RED and the whole TROIS COULEURS trilogy qualifies as one of the most blindly overrated film experiments to come out of Europe in recent memory (but then again, look at the ecstatic reception some of those mediocre-to-gawdawful Dogme 95 films are getting these days). His Felliniesque emphasis on man's spiritual life is intriguing but the overreliance on 'fate' or 'chance' as the determining factor in the characters' lives - as the mysterious force that ultimately brings everyone together -- seems vague and facile. Consequently, the narrative often feels contrived and opportunistic - it just doesn't sit right and you get the impression that Kieslowski is cheating with the story, that he is groping for some kind of fuzzy-headed New Age revelation that he hasn't properly earned. It's a seductive con at first but the dialogue, particularly Trintignant's, is full of quasi-cryptic, pseudo-profound banalities (e.g., `Perhaps you were the woman I never met.') that come across as merely pompous and half-heartedly nondescript attempts at gnomic wisdom. And while Kieslowski is no doubt a master visual stylist, I am rather suspicious of his rather monotonous and all-too-obvious use of filtered light to create an atmosphere of supposed inner awareness and expectancy. His images aren't really any more interesting or meaningful than the fashion layouts and chewing gum advertisements he seems to be obliquely criticizing. As Pauline Kael once asked, `do symbols plus pretty pictures equal art?'

Michael Radford's utterly superlative film of Orwell's famed novel may well be the greatest cinematic adaptation of a major literary source ever -- and it stands out as one of the most memorable British films of the past thirty years. Full credit is due to cinematographer Roger Deakins who shoots everything in grainy, washed-out, desaturated colors adding to the picture's atmosphere of wistful yet austere, dream-like strangeness. The modern London settings -- with their cobblestone streets, shabby, dilapidated buildings, desolate fields, rubble-strewn alleyways, and forbidding, blackened Gothic-Victorian façades and hints of minimalist fascist architecture -- resemble a Depression-era housing project after the Luftwaffe. And Dominic Muldowney's score, with its martial clarion calls, bombastic church-organ blasts, and swelling choral leitmotiv of `Oceania, 'tis for thee,' has a mixture of Wagnerian grandeur and Bach-like religiosity about it. All the while, the bizarre, mantra-like drones of the much-maligned Eurythmics soundtrack rises and falls, weaving in and out of the narrative like so many subconscious banshee wails.

Radford treats the book's premise not as a sci-fi flight of fantasy or grim prophecy but rather as the world of 1948 seen through a glass darkly -- a kind of medieval morality play for the post-totalitarian age. There is less emphasis on the novel's musty, well-worn-and-endlessly-picked-over polemical import and more focus on the stark human element, and indeed, the actors bear such uncanny resemblance to Orwell's descriptions they practically seem born for their roles.

With his quiet, brooding eloquence and haunted eyes peeking out of a gaunt, cadaverous frame like a tubercular, ashen-faced Egon Schiele figure, John Hurt is ideally cast as Winston Smith. As Julia, Suzanna Hamilton (first seen as a lovelorn dairymaid in Polanski's TESS and as the paralyzed daughter in BRIMSTONE AND TREACLE) has a serene, arresting presence – and she appears as mysteriously stirring and beguiling to us as she does to Hurt. She brings a captivating freshness and warmth to her role, a little reminiscent of a young Harriet Andersson. Her pale, wiry, broad-hipped body has a simple, unaffected, almost archetypal beauty, and in the film's more intimate moments, she radiates all the tactile sensual grace of a Munch or Degas nude.

As O'Brien, the Jesuitical inquisitor of infinite patience, Richard Burton delivers a superbly perspicacious swan-song performance – he becomes almost a kind of an oracular Thanatos to Hamilton's Eros. In an exquisite, maliciously Swiftian twist of irony, Burton's famous voice, with its rich, mellifluous Welsh inflections and descending cadences of Shakespearean sonnets and Dylan Thomas poetry, becomes a cruel herald of the willful, systematic destruction of the human spirit -- of `the worst thing in the world' that waits in Room 101… in the fated `place where there is no darkness.' When O'Brien tells Winston, `you are thinking that my face is old and tired…and that while I talk of power I am unable to prevent the decay of my own body,' Burton's sagging, weary face speaks volumes.

In the lesser roles, Gregor Fisher's Parsons literally resembles a sweaty frog, James Walker's Syme is the classic image of a squirrelly, mealy-mouthed hack-intellectual, while Andrew Wilde cuts the most chilling figure as the bespectacled, unblinking ‘company man,' Tillotson. The late Cyril Cusack plays Mr. Charrington, the kindly Cockney landlord who is not all that he appears to be, with an understated sentimental charm punctuated by slight flickers of calculating menace (watch closely for the way Cusack's facial expression changes whenever Hurt is not looking at him). Phyllis Logan (the star of Radford's début feature, ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE, and a supporting player in Mike Leigh's SECRETS AND LIES) provides one of the film's most clever unacknowledged ironies: as the Telescreen Announcer, her strident, hectoring voice suggests a more shrill caricature of Margaret Thatcher.

If anything, this film makes a unique and compelling case for some of the oldest cinematic devices in the book that nearly all contemporary filmmakers have since abandoned: slow dissolves, fades, blackouts, shock-cuts, slow motion, flashbacks, montage. The high-contrast photography, alternately harsh and low-key lighting, and iconic close-up shots evoke the abstract, transcendental purity of Bresson or Dreyer. There is even one extraordinary sequence when Winston, bruised and battered, is seen having his head shorn in a holding cell that is clearly meant to recall Falconetti's famous haircutting scene in Dreyer's LA PASSION DE JEANNE D'ARC (1928). Similarly, Burton is filmed in oppressive, looming low-angle with Expressionist shadows defining the lines of his craggy visage à la Eugène Silvain's Bishop Cauchon sans the warts. And the idyllic barley fields of the ‘Golden Country,' where Winston and Julia have their first tryst is a possible homage to the titular peasant paradise of Dovzhenko's EARTH (1926).

What makes the film so powerful is not merely its fidelity to its source but its vivid sense of realism. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR is such an impassioned and richly textured work that the visuals almost seem to seep into the pores of your skin, intoxicating you with dread and longing. And Radford is so adept at obscuring the boundaries that separate the ameliorative persistence of reverie from the glaring harshness of waking reality, that the film's seamless perfection becomes almost frightening.