movie poster for A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM

Flicks ID

8966

Cert

U

Running time

115 mins

Country

Language

Format

DVD

A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM (1999)

MICHAEL HOFFMAN

Plot

Star-spangled, lavish looking reworking of Shakespeare's whimsical comedy, shunted forward to the 19th Century. Comfortably condensed into two hours, with lots of lurex and digital effects, some might say this is the literature-lite version, but it's refreshingly unpretentious, and the four leads are excellent as the quartet of bickering lovers, with Calista Flockhart being mischieviously cast as the whingingly desperate Hermia. A tad "amateur-dramatics-society" in places, but the sight of Flockhart and Anna Friel mud-wrestling is surely worth a look!