Lady Macbeth

A young wife (Florence Pugh) embarks on a torrid affair with one of her abusive husband’s stablemen (Cosmo Jarvis), and in her heedless passion she resorts to a series of murders to cover her tracks—and in revenge for the cruelty she has suffered. Writer Alice Birch and director William Oldroyd transplant Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella from Tsarist Russia to Victorian England, omitting the second half of the story and changing the ending to make some vague points of their own about sexism and the British class system. The result is cold and unconvincing, by turns dull and repellent. Plot developments are implausible, characters are shallow stick figures that give the actors too little to work with. Still, they do what they can, and Ari Wegner’s stark cinematography is more interesting than the story. J.L.