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Romeo + Juliet

Williams Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

1996

Baz Luhrmann

Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, Pete Postlethwaite, Harold Perrineau ...

6.3

30,129

Romance. Drama This ambitious undertaking, adapting William Shakespeare's classic tale of star-crossed lovers and setting the story in a glossy music-video style in 1990s Florida. Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes play the famous lovers kept apart by rival industrialist families. Bookended by newscastsers reciting Shakespeare's prose as their copy, this clever glam updating of ROMEO AND JULIET is one of the most unusual adaptations of the Bard's work ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times	"Baz Luhrmann has made a film that (a) will dismay any lover of Shakespeare, and (b) bore anyone lured into the theater by promise of gang wars, MTV-style (...) Rating: ★★ (out of 4)"	NEU
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"A whirlwind of hardball action, rowdy humor and rapturous romance."	POS
United States	David Hunter The Hollywood Reporter	"The film delivers memorable renderings of the central story's most famous moments, while leads Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes are superb."	POS
United States	Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly	"A series of spectacular production designs posing as a motion picture"	NEU
United Kingdom	Bob McCabe Empire	"At the end of the day you can say that it's just a gimmick designed to sell the Bard to the masses. But a bloody good gimmick all the same (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Variety Staff Variety	"Although arresting in spots, it falls far short of bringing out the full values of the play, and doesn’t approach the emotional resonance of Franco Zeffirelli’s immensely popular 1968 screen version"	NEU
United States	Janet Maslin The New York Times	"It's as exhausting as it is bold (...) a visual universe fully in tune with the characters' ageless passions."	NEU
United States	Mick LaSalle SFGATE	"A monumental disaster (...) Emotion is the first thing Luhrmann kills in this update"	NEG

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