Curator Watchlist
A wildly stylized, blood-soaked Shakespeare adaptation that swings for the fences and mostly lands through sheer audacity. It’s not subtle or easy, but its visual invention, ferocious performances, and operatic excess make it a memorable watch for viewers who like their classics remixed into something feverish and… Read more
Where to watch: Buy
Sat · 2h 42m
Director: Julie Taymor
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Jonathan Rhys Meyers
Titus Andronicus returns from the wars and sees his sons and daughters taken from him, one by one. Shakespeare's goriest and earliest tragedy.
Julie Taymor
Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Jonathan Rhys Meyers
A wildly stylized, blood-soaked Shakespeare adaptation that swings for the fences and mostly lands through sheer audacity. It’s not subtle or easy, but its visual invention, ferocious performances, and operatic excess make it a memorable watch for viewers who like their classics remixed into something feverish and modern.
Julie Taymor’s Titus is less a museum-piece Shakespeare adaptation than a full-body assault of image, sound, and performance. It takes one of the playwright’s most savage tragedies and turns it into a delirious collision of ancient Rome, fascist pageantry, and late-20th-century pop-art excess. The result is unruly, but that unruliness is the point: this is a film that wants to overwhelm you.
Anthony Hopkins anchors the chaos with a Titus that is both imperious and broken, while the production design and costumes keep shifting the film between historical spectacle and surreal nightmare. The violence is notorious, but the movie’s real shock is its confidence in going bigger, stranger, and more theatrical than almost any mainstream Shakespeare film of its era.
It won’t be for everyone, especially viewers who want tonal consistency or classical restraint. But for those who respond to bold formalism, camp grandeur, and adaptations that treat Shakespeare as living, dangerous material, Titus is a singular experience and one of the most distinctive literary films of the 1990s.
Silent J (5★) · 873 likes
I'll be damned if "Villain, I have done thy mother." is not the greatest line that Shakespeare ever wrote. Who knew Shakespeare cracked Yo Momma jokes back in the day?
Ben Peterson (4.5★) · 248 likes
Me: I know this Shakes adaptation came out in ’99, but it’s a period piece. It couldn’t POSSIBLY be indicative of the year 1999. The Movie: cut to a bleached blonde, rave-leather overalls wearing Matthew Rhys listening to industrial techno while playing Road Rash in his man-dungeon. Me: ok you win.
Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine (4★) · 218 likes
This film can be accused of many things, but lacking ambition it will never be one of them. As a result of her Spiderman play disaster, Julie Taymor has become synonymous with creative genius, yet a lack of control, which, when well executed, can result in an opulent and wonderfully epic version of one of Shakespeare's least discussed plays. In contrast, when the director overdoes it, the result is a catastrophe that borders on incomprehensible. In this case, both sides
Wood (4★) · 113 likes
I love that Shakespeare shit, but I really love that wacky Shakespeare shit.
Kyle Turner (4.5★) · 100 likes
Julie Taymor has what Baz Lurhmann wants
Another grand, high-style Shakespeare adaptation that embraces scale, performance, and cinematic flourish.
A bold, modernized Shakespeare adaptation with fascist imagery, political menace, and theatrical swagger.
A grim, blood-drenched tragedy that matches Titus in its sense of doom and moral rot.
For viewers drawn to stark, expressionistic Shakespeare rendered as nightmare cinema.
Epic betrayal, family collapse, and battlefield grandeur in one of cinema’s great tragic spectacles.
A ferocious, atmospheric reinvention of Shakespeare that turns ambition into dread.
For its grotesque baroque style, theatrical cruelty, and appetite for excess.
A meticulously designed period piece where artifice and power games dominate every frame.
Silent-era expressionism with the same taste for stylized decay and nightmare imagery.
A serious, confrontational work that treats sacred narrative with intensity and visual boldness.
A royal family drama fueled by venom, manipulation, and verbal combat.
For another performance-driven historical drama about power, breakdown, and public spectacle.
revenge, betrayal, family destruction, political power, war trauma, ritual and spectacle, madness, corruption
Shakespeare adaptation, revenge tragedy, gothic excess, stylized violence, operatic, surreal visuals, late 1990s, theatrical, historical drama, art-house