Joel Coen's "The Tragedy of Macbeth" will make its World Premiere on the Opening Night of the 59th New York Film Festival on 24th September 2021.
A work of stark chiaroscuro and incantatory rage, Joel Coen's boldly inventive visualisation of The Scottish Play is an anguished film that stares, mouth agape, at a sorrowful world undone by blind greed and thoughtless ambition. In meticulously world-weary performances, a strikingly inward Denzel Washington is the man who would be king, and an effortlessly Machiavellian Frances McDormand is his Lady, a couple driven to political assassination - and deranged by guilt - after the cunning prognostications of a trio of "weird sisters" (a virtuoso physical inhabitation by Kathryn Hunter). Though it echoes the forbidding visual designs - and aspect ratios - of Laurence Olivier's classic 1940s Shakespeare adaptations, as well as the bloody medieval madness of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, Coen’s tale of sound and fury is entirely his own—and undoubtedly one for our moment, a frightening depiction of amoral political power-grabbing that, like its hero, ruthlessly barrels ahead into the inferno. An Apple/A24 release.
