A Midsummer Night's Dream

For my money the most gloriously, enchantingly trivial play in the Shakespearean canon, A Midsummer Night's Dream may also be the most screwup-proof of the bard's works. Read full review

A thoroughly enjoyable piece of cinema that does credit to its director and cast. Read full review

Hoffman (Soapdish, One Fine Day) leads a first-rate cast in an intelligent, fully realized adaptation of Shakespeare's most popular comedy that's at once highly cinematic and true to its source. Read full review

One of the best of the many delights of director Michael Hoffman's new film -- is that he manages to have it both ways -- the gauzy fantasy and the bacchanal. Read full review

Only the title is clunky in this felicitous marriage of cinematic trickery, theatrical whimsy and the Bard's fabulous tale. Read full review

Most of the original play's magical speeches are preserved here, and however far this film may seem to stray from the original text, the delights remain. [14 May 1999, Friday, p.A]

A gorgeous sliver of grown-up ambrosia. Read full review

A playful, sexy piece of work -- just what the Bard might have conjured up for a movie adaptation of his beloved spring-fever comedy. Read full review

The well chosen cast helps -- no one strikes a false note. Read full review

It is an enchanted folly suggesting that romance is a matter of chance, since love is blind; at the right moment we are likely to fall in love with the first person our eyes light upon. Read full review

Hoffman has wedged the play into a weirdly inapposite setting, has stupidly cut and even more stupidly embellished it, and has miscast it almost to a player. And yet the damn thing works: Shakespeare staggers through, mutilated but triumphant. Read full review

Hoffman introduces a memorable sensuality to the movie. Read full review

The major flaw, the clash of acting styles, is at least fascinating to observe. [14 May 1999, Life, p.8E]

Whimsical, intermittently enjoyable but decidedly unmagical. Read full review

Uneven but spunkily energetic movie. Read full review

Kline turns in a bravura performance -- he's one of the few in this star-packed cast who actually knows what to do with Shakespeare's poetry. Read full review

Shakespeare's comical, all-too-human tale of lust, foreplay and wordplay is buried beneath bad taste. Read full review

The set design is gung-ho Hallmark (Tinkerbell lights, that sort of thing) with a strong whiff of Fellini (the fairy glade looks like a pre-Raphaelite red-light district). Read full review

A parade of incongruities, with performances ranging from the sublime to the you-know-what. Read full review

If the picture is often less spellbinding than it wants to be, it's partly Hoffman's fault for creating fantasy moods through traditional stage devices -- lavish props, cute makeup, peek-a-boo costumes -- that seem rather tame for this age of morphed-up visual surprises. Read full review

The early scenes whir and buzz along to create quite a pleasing clamor. Read full review

A thoroughly respectable affair: Your high school English teacher would approve, and parts are terrifically enjoyable. Read full review

This is a chance to see Shakespeare with mud wrestling, something the Bard surely would have put in if only he'd thought of it himself… Though the actors have no major problems handling the language, the whole venture is listless when it should be sparkling. Shakespeare, even with mud wrestling, needn't be quite so much of a slog. [14 May 1999, Calendar, p.F-6]

Kevin Kline does his best movie work yet as Nick Bottom...But in most other ways this "Midsummer Night" is hard to endure. Read full review