Titus.

Cineaste, March, 2001 by Nochimson, Martha

Directed by Julie Taymor; screenplay by Julie Taymor, adapated from William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Color, 162 mins. Special Edition DVD released by Twentieth-Century Fox.

Julie Taymor's film Titus, adapted from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, makes manifest why this play, once considered so inferior that scholars doubted its paternity, has recently gained a new lease on life. Taymor herself mounted the play in 1994 for Theatre for a New Audience at St. Clement's Church in New York City and has used the cinematic medium to open up her own well-regarded stage production. Film has increased Taymor's options, or perhaps more accurately she has seized upon them, to render Shakespeare's play a mirror for the horrific violence of the twentieth century and to...