Apple TV

Could Macbeth be Shakespeare’s most innately cinematic play? Even in its brief stage directions and off-stage action, it conjures up daring battlefields, horrible massacres, spine-tingling witchcraft, wandering spirits, duels on castle ramparts, and a moveable forest. Every few years another filmmaker tries their hand at it, Orson Welles (Macbeth, 1948), Akira Kurosawa (Throne of Blood, 1957), and Roman Polanski (Macbeth, 1971) notable among them. 2006 gave us Geoffrey Wright’s best-forgotten Dunsinane-does-Underbelly version, while Justin Kurzel (director of Snowtown and the recent Nitram) injected his terrific 2015 version with rousing battle sequences and a blockbuster-ready, musclebound Thane of Glamis. Now, not long after Kurzel’s film, comes The Tragedy of Macbeth from Joel Coen, working without his brother Ethan for the first time in decades. Where Kurzel’s version aimed for historical realism and cinematic virtuosity, Coen’s adaptation is faithful above all else to Macbeth’s original medium: the theatre.

The fiction of Stephen King has always been ripe for a retelling – rich yarns recycled from iteration to iteration, enduring beyond their original prose. The occupied bathtub of Room 237, the soporific taunts of a clown in a gutter, the oily habits of undead feline – all are as cryptic and terrifying in ink as they are on film. Based on King’s 2006 novel of the same name, this eight-episode Apple TV mini-series adaptation, with King himself as scriptwriter, is the most recent such retelling. It is lush with ideas: a dream world, Boo’ya Moon, where an ochre sun hangs low at permanent dusk; a neologism, ‘bool’, which can mean all manner of things, light and dark; and a new protagonist, Lisey (Julianne Moore), widow of writer Scott Landon (Clive Owen), who journeys through long, endless hallways of memory, lost in a melancholic swirl of grief and trauma.