A new black-and-white film adaptation to William Shakespeare’s timeless classic play Macbeth will kick off the 59th annual New York Film Festival. Directed by award-winning director, Joel Coen who is making his solo directing debut with this film. The film stars Denzel Washington as Macbeth and Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth. The film will make its world premiere this Friday, September 24, at Alice Tully Hall. The new adaptation is titled, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and today the short trailer made its premiere!
The trailer is under the one-minute mark but packs enough to get viewers interested in what the adaptation offers. The trailer kicks off with the infamous words from the play, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” Although premiering at the film festival, the film is set to officially release in select theaters on Christmas Day, followed by a release to Apple TV+ on January 14.
As excitement builds for the world premiere, Coen had this to say,
“The New York Film Festival is a place where I’ve been watching movies as an audience member and showing them as a filmmaker for almost 50 years,” said director Joel Coen. “It’s a real privilege and a thrill to be opening the Festival this year with The Tragedy of Macbeth.”
NYFF also released an official statement about the film and its synopsis. Check it out below as we wait for the official release!
A work of stark chiaroscuro and incantatory rage, Joel Coen’s boldly inventive visualization of The Scottish Play is an anguished film that stares, mouth agape, at a sorrowful world undone by blind greed and thoughtless ambition. In meticulously world-weary performances, a strikingly inward Denzel Washington is the man who would be king, and an effortlessly Machiavellian Frances McDormand is his Lady, a couple driven to political assassination – and deranged by guilt – after the cunning prognostications of a trio of “weird sisters” (a virtuoso physical inhabitation by Kathryn Hunter). Though it echoes the forbidding visual designs – and aspect ratios – of Laurence Olivier’s classic 1940s Shakespeare adaptations, as well as the bloody medieval madness of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Coen’s tale of sound and fury is entirely his own- and undoubtedly one for our moment, a frightening depiction of amoral political power-grabbing that, like its hero, ruthlessly barrels ahead into the inferno. An Apple/A24 release.