SOURCE: Rothwell, Kenneth S. “Shakespeare Goes Digital.” Cineaste 25, no. 3 (summer 2000): 150.

In the following review of Michael Hoffman's 1999 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Rothwell praises the film as a visual masterpiece and lauds Kevin Kline's ability to turn the cartoonish character of Bottom into “a living, breathing, and very vulnerable, human being.”

The opening credits of Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream (“Based on the play by William Shakespeare”) situate the action around the year 1900 in Monte Athena in Tuscany, Italy, one of those fabulous Italian hilltop towns but not exactly the Athens of Shakespeare's play. Then again his film is “based” on Shakespeare's play, not the thing itself, a salient point that Shakespeare on film critics sometimes egregiously overlook. In spectacular color on crystalline DVD, wherein it is divided into twenty-five ‘chapters’ for random access, Hoffman's movie is stunningly designed, costumed, and photographed. In a lush...