Directed by Michael Almereyda • 2000 • United States
Starring Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Bill Murray

You’ve never seen a HAMLET like this, with Ethan Hawke as the titular melancholy Dane—here a New York City film student in the year 2000—who sets out to avenge the killing of his father, the former CEO of the multinational Denmark Corporation, by his duplicitous uncle Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan). An at once of-the-moment and strikingly prescient Y2K-era time capsule—with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue uttered in a Blockbuster Video, Ophelia (Julia Stiles) dialing up Moviefone, and a profusion of surveillance devices and digital screens-within-screens littering the mise-en-scène—this coolly stylized adaptation from director Michael Almereyda (EXPERIMENTER) finds intriguing contemporary resonances in a classic tragedy.