Romeo + Juliet [DVD] [1996]

Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom) takes a shot at reinventing Shakespeare's story of star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet as a visual pastiche inspired by MTV imagery, Hong Kong action-picture clichés, and Luhrmann's own taste for deliberate, gaudy excess. The result is explosive chaos, both in terms of bullets and visual sensibility, which some may find impossible to stick with for more than a few minutes. Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes play the leads, though not with much distinction, while Pete Postlethwaite makes a huge impression as this movie's version of Friar Laurence. The film is successful in spots, but overall its fever-dream game plan is difficult to ride out. --Tom Keogh

While perhaps not the defining moment in the making of Leonardo DiCaprio’s career, his appearance in this dazzling take on William Shakepeare’s Romeo & Juliet back in 1996 did the careers of both Clare Danes and himself no harm at all. Perhaps the real star of the show here though is director Baz Luhrmann, who employs a frenetic, at times downright-brilliant style to the age-old tale of tale of star-crossed lovers. Luhrmann would go on to make Moulin Rouge a few years’ later.

From the off, his take on Romeo & Juliet explodes unpredictably onto the screen, bubbling with vision and originality, accompanied throughout by an excellent score and soundtrack that rightly spawned two spin-off CDs. There are sacrifices made along the way to support Luhrmann’s vision though, with the text being stripped down to leave the core of the story in tact, and that’s just one of a number of complaints that Shakespeare purists may have.

And yet, perhaps more than any other attempt to bring the work of the Bard to the screen of late, this is an extremely accessible entry-point to Shakepeare’s work. That it’s also by turns breathtaking, dazzling and a sheer joy to watch doesn’t harm its cause either. The two leads are charming, the support cast backs them up superbly, and the end result is one of the most interesting visual treats that Hollywood mustered up throughout the 1990s.--Simon Brew