SOURCE: Alleva, Richard. Review of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Commonweal 126, no. 12 (18 June 1999): 20-1.

In the following review, Alleva offers a mixed assessment of Michael Hoffman's 1999 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The critic censures some of the actors' performances, most notably Michelle Pfeiffer's “gracelessly spoken performance” as Titania. Alleva further claims that while Kevin Kline reduces Bottom to an emotionally fragile clown, this approach works well in Hoffman's production.

Judged by the film he has made from it, two elements of A Midsummer Night's Dream seem to have fascinated the director Michael Hoffman nearly to the exclusion of everything else in the play: the supernatural sylvan community ruled by Oberon and Titania, and the character of Bottom the weaver.

Up to the moment when the camera enters the forest, this production is a typical example of the cute modernization of Shakespeare. Instead of ancient Athens, Hoffman sets...