Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes, 2011)

Ralph Fiennes takes the Olivier/Branagh route of directing and starring in a Shakespeare, but with some considerable advantages over either. As an actor, he may be as posh as either, but has none of the mannered air, and while the play could be considered one of the lesser of the tragedies, his searing performance reaches out through barriers of time and place. The same principle applies to the rest of the casting - no freeloading luvvie pals here: Gerard Butler is hardly in that category, and Brian Cox and Vanessa Redgrave are towers of support.
The plot sticks fairly faithfully to the outline of the source, with the Roman general Caius Martius, a blunt man only suited for war, exiled for his undisguised contempt for civilians, and then returning to wreak revenge. In the manner that Shakespeare is somewhat mechanically still being done, i.e. updated to the contemporary world to milk out universal parallels, while retaining the language, it's shot largely in Serbia with the cast in Chetnik uniforms, gun battles in ruined Balkan cityscapes and TV reports on the background action. This works for the most part by sheer shock effect, yet occasionally overdoes it and descends into silliness, as when a key battle ends up with the generals Fiennes and Butler brawling before their troops or Jon Snow delivers the news in blank verse. But it is worth seeing for Fiennes alone: rarely has he displayed so much range and manages to invest a basically unlikable character with surprising pathos.

7/10