When Branagh elected to make his vision of Shakespeare's all-conquering tale into the grandest of the cinematic versions, he surely gave little mind to its ultimate fate, placed on a Blockbuster shelf between Mel Gibson and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. Faced with those choices should the casual renter go for hunkdom, horror or high art?
In the end, there should be no debate, just take this and get all three. Feel the quality and get twice the width (plus an interval and recap!). True, squeezed into a letterbox format like a Sunday paper, the much-trumpeted 70mm original loses the jaw-dropping impact it had on the cinema screen, but it is no less richly coloured for its loss of scale.
The top-line performances are uniformly awesome, with Winslet in particular playing well beyond her years. There are stunning support turns too, notably from Richard Briers, Michael Maloney and Charlton Heston, plus well-paced levity from box office carrots Gerard Depardieu, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, and box office turnip Ken Dodd.