The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 20-26
Macbeth (1971)
Directed by Roman Polanski
You probably didn’t watch this in high school English. Evil escapes Polanski’s cracked hallways and Satanic households for boundless, damned shores, maximizing the tragedy-stricken auteur’s preoccupations with paranoid madness, sex-tinged violence, and claustrophobia. Polanski doesn’t withhold the Scottish Play’s most brutal implications; for every suspicious glare or anxious monologue, there’s a casual lynching or indifferent slashing. Francesca Annis’s Lady Macbeth—another doomed woman for Polanski’s roster—and the titular bastard himself (Jon Finch, whose physical performance is rare for Shakespeare) are second fiddle to the creeping mood, upheld by unnverving strings and nightmarish chimeras. That it is all shot with enormous beauty makes the experience all the more unsettling. Thick as the film is with fog and filthy air, you can almost taste the corrupt power couple’s ambition like a cauldron-born potion. Max Kyburz (January 21, 1pm, 3:40pm, 7pm, 9:40pm at Film Forum‘s Shakespeare series)