A Midsummer Night's Dream

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