Titus

A Roman general (Anthony Hopkins) runs afoul of his emperor’s new wife (Jessica Lange); when she takes revenge on him for killing her son; he wreaks an even more terrible vengeance on her. Shakespeare’s first and bloodiest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, is seldom produced—all that rape, murder, mutilation, tongue-ripping, and cannibalism is a bit much for modern sensibilities. All the more reason to cherish this flamboyantly theatrical adaptation by stage director Julie Taymor (of Broadway’s The Lion King). Taymor’s effects are sometimes overwrought (a prologue with a boy vandalizing a kitchen; the trite Ancient-Rome-as-Fascism concept), but she keeps the main arc of the narrative under control, aided greatly by her fine cast (Hopkins, Lange, Alan Cumming, Colm Feore, Harry J. Lennix).