Some consider Hamlet to be Shakespeare's finest tragedy. I disagree, and cast my vote for King Lear. But, who am I kidding, I love the Great Dane, too. Go get your father's killer, good sir! In terms of film adaptations, it sure has a lot going for it, as well. Here is my humble list of the five best film adaptations of Hamlet.
5
Ethan Hawke is Hamlet, Hamlet makes student films, and Denmark is a corporation. Michael Almereyda's simply-titled Hamlet, made and set in 2000, is a bold attempt to separate the play from old men with British accents. It has its fair share of problems, and the acting is sketchy, but its creativity and youthfulness more than compensate. Shakespeare still lives if we can still struggle with adapting him.
4
If Hamlet has a quintessential film production, it's this one: Laurence Olivier's. Made in 1948, it's the first adaptation made with sound, and still the standard—at least in that all newer adaptations have to implicitly acknowledge its existence by making their versions different. True, it's not as enjoyable or novel as it was in the 1940s, and people often complain that it's slow and uncinematic, but it's still damn important. As for the camerawork, itself: though people rightly complain that it's a bit crude, it's also meaningful. Olivier's camera has a purpose.
3Has overtaken Olivier's as the Hamlet most often shown in schools (because kids don't like to read, and school boards would rather spend money on inane guest speakers than organize a field trip to a theater). I put it third, instead of fourth, for only one reason, though: it's the first film adaptation to use every word of Shakespeare's text. That makes it an excellent starting point for watching Hamlet. Oh, and you get celebrity cameos to help get you through the hours.
2Kurosawa loved Shakespeare. The Bad Sleep Well, his transposition of Hamlet to corporate Japan, though it may appear a little gimmicky at first glance, is breathtakingly bleak cinema. Beautiful wide compositions create a sense of iconography, and crisp black and white cinematography adds a touch of noir to proceedings. Fair warning to Shakespeare fans, however: Kurosawa plays quite loose with the original. On the Criterion disc, you also get, appropriately enough, an essay by Michael Almereyda.
1The screen's most evocative, effective, and affecting Hamlet was made in the Soviet Union in 1964. Who'd have thunk it! But Kozintsev's not-so-widely seen Hamlet is the real deal: great Hamlet and great film. It matches Kurosawa for cinematography and, as far as the subtitles make out, matches Olivier for Hamlet-ness. Russian Nobel winner Boris Pasternak did the translating. And how's this for being cinematic: the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy is delivered with Hamlet's back to the audience—in voice over!
