Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The gold standard for Shakespeare's adaptations. Newer films with better cameras, lenses, film stock, new actors with the benefit of decades of acting to study, improvement in sound, microphones, bigger budgets for scores and for the whole film and not only has no one been able to make a better Macbeth than Polanski, but no one has made any better film adaptation of any of Shakespeare's work. This is the gold standard and it is yet to be beaten.The latest adaptation, Kurzel's 2016 Macbeth, is a beautiful audio and visual experience, but is a poorer film.This film is raw. Perhaps the old film stock, the lenses and the lower production standards (I saw it in 1080p, but it still looked raw) made this film look more real. It's so earthy and bloody, so dark, foggy and dirty. Macbeth is not a renaissance-era king, he is a king of a poor nation, his castle is not one of luxury but a military fort, his ascent to the throne does not take him into a life of royalty and comfort - he only becomes the highest ranking military leader with a heavy crown on his head.It really places Macbeth in his time, he is not just a pragmatic opportunist, but he is a product of his environment in a country where everyone is fighting for survival.Rather than present the world as a just place where just kings and just monarchies rule uninterruptedly until selfish Macbeth ruins this medieval utopia, the throne and the crown are shown as a hot potato that no one could hold on for too long. The world is a cruel place and Macbeth and his wife play this political game, but they are neither the first nor the last, they were not the worst but certainly not the best, for their victory was short-lived - they were the fiercest and most intelligent in a very thin slice of time and once that time was over, it was someone else's turn to play this game.That's what I loved about this film - not presenting the Macbeths as a political anomaly, but business as usual. This was a mere chapter in the bloody history of Scotland, not the story of one particular tyrant in an otherwise peaceful history.It is king of the hill and victories are all short-lived. Heroes are rewarded, their ambitions grow, rivalries arise and things are decided by the sword.This film is, however, less of a historical film and more of a psychological horror, the relationship between the king and queen collapsing under the weight of their guilt, mental disease and the two kings of suffering Macbeth endures - the guilt of how he got the crown and the separate pressures of ruling Scotland, which every king, legitimate or not must endure, a position which did not turn out to be the dream job he had envisioned, but a nightmare as he has become the biggest target.The Macbeths had the gall for the act of treason, but not the stomach for the long term consequences. It is the intertwined story of the individual, the couple and the nation. It is not one more than the other. They are all sides of the same Mobius strip.Polanski takes Shakespeare's message and without changing it much, he amplifies it.

Witches deliver a prophesy to Scottish warlord Macbeth that he will be King. Macbeth's wife pushes him towards the notion that the only way to ensure this is by killing the current King himself. And so he embarks on a fateful course of events.Roman Polanski's 1971 adaptation of Macbeth, one of Shakespeare's darkest plays, makes full use of cinema to place the words of the play into a grim, grey, grimy reality. As you watch Macbeth work his way further along a road to tragedy, the visuals which accompany Shakespeare's words place those words into a brutally real world.The performances are great, but this is an excellent adaptation, and makes you think that this is perhaps the sort of presentation which Shakespeare might have been involved in making had he still been alive.

Vehement and inch-perfect approach of Roman Polanski towards Shakespeare's greatest play "Macbeth". Polanski's absolute narrative technique and profound direction set the heinous deed of Macbeth and his tragic fate with elegance. He brilliantly represents all Shakespearean symbols on the screen--- especially the floating "dagger", apparitions in the witches' den. Jon Finch powerfully portrays the downfall of Macbeth while Annis appears vivid struggling with her greed and conscience. Vibrantly, one of the mightiest adaptations from Shakespeare's :p8/10__:D

While watching his frighteningly dark and nihilistic take on Shakespeare's Macbeth, I think of just what a fascinating story the life of Roman Polanski is, and has become. It is with the most pitch black sense of irony I realize that the film he made, in part one must assume, to deal with his own tragedy today mirrors his future lawsuit - towards the end of the movie it was scarily easy to draw the connection line between Polanski himself and Macbeth who, despite his frustration and angst, cannot escape the consequences of his crime.If justice truly is blind - and Polanski certainly doesn't express any other point of view in this film - then anyone with blood on his hands will get what's coming to him. I still have a hard time though, to feel any greater feeling of proud anger towards a 76 year old man who got his wife gutted while she was eight months pregnant, now facing a 30 year old case that nobody cares about anymore, and that nobody involved with wants to have any more to do with.That becomes even clearer when you see Macbeth. You can only imagine Polanski's mindset when he decided to make this movie. It seems as if he was inclined on not making anything false or half-hearted, he drew a sharp line with co-writer Kenneth Tynan and seems to have held the course all throughout production. The spectator tone, of distant coldness, is never broken. Never does it seems like Polanski interferes with the action that takes place. Never do the characters plea to the audience, never is there a message being presented. It all lacks rhyme and reason, the tragedy takes place before our eyes but it only "occurs". A child is murdered, a good man gets an axe in the back, witches cackle, Macbeth himself is so afraid, his experience of fear is vastly greater than any of his other - yet none of these things are dealt with in any different fashion. Many have tried to make Macbeth into a human story - where Macbeth's follies and illusions of grandeur do assure his fall, but are also what makes him human. Maybe it is what makes Polanski's Macbeth human too. This word "human" though, comes off as meaningless and Polanski's portrayal of humanity as a whole, seems to be that of an endless chain of commitment and detachment, promise and betrayal, and murder upon murder upon murder. This is by far one of the most pessimistic and depressive films I have ever seen. The most disturbing part of it is probably towards the end where you watch killings and unspectacular executions and you as a viewer experience nothing. Whereas many modern moral tales or anti-war movies - like Requiem for a Dream or American History X - use excessive violence to shock and stir an emotional catharsis, there is a detached numbness to the excessive violence in Macbeth that makes is truly and utterly disturbing. In a way, watching the movie feels like having a lobotomy.Naturally, much of this comes from the murder of Sharon Tate, which echoes throughout the entire movie, but while there are many obvious details making the movie so hauntingly personal, there is also a lot in the movie that simply tells Shakespeare's tragedy in an even more depressing light. After all, despite the many attempts to make sense and sensibility out of the Macbeth story, the overall message of the story seems to be that life is a cold and meaningless affair, you live until you die, nothing matters and surrounded by beautiful landscapes men kill and kill again. It seems like Polanski is simply doing the play as literal as possible. Who's to say Shakespeare himself wasn't in the same state as Polanski when he wrote the play? Who's to say Polanski's Macbeth isn't the most accurate?