Othello.

There are also several striking and suggestive images in Oliver Parker's version of Othello, but they don't cohere. The directorial ideas stay fugitive because there is no central concept to hold them together. There is no convincing sense of place in this movie. There is no world. In that respect this movie is inferior to Richard III.

And an Othello without a proper Moor is as lame as a Hamlet without the prince. This is odd because lago is on stage almost twice as long as his general and is by far the showier role. Nevertheless, midway through the story, if the black general doesn't explode, or at least sizzle, the play never happens. An Othello who bums like ice might be provocative, but Laurence Fishburne is merely as cold as a spring drizzle, delivering his lines in the manner of an English professor reading the text to a mildly bored class. Bernard Shaw was right when he observed that any actor playing the Moor "must have the orchestral quality in him." But Fishburne hath no such music.

The rest of the cast ranges from adequate to excellent with Kenneth Branagh contributing an Iago so radically perverted that he seems to think he is doing the right thing when he works havoc. Weirdly enough, Branagh comes close to being the "honest lago" that his victims take him for, and the ambiguity makes this performance much more disturbing than the usual Machiavellian slyboots characterization of the ensign. But the play is called Othello, not lago.

Both of these films will soon be available on video. But if you're planning to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday on April 23, see if your library or video store has Olivier's Richard III or Orson Welles's Othello. These are movies that don't shrink or scramble Shakespeare but instead expand cinema to contain the bard.