Coriolanus

Directed by Ralph Fiennes

(R)

***

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While Ralph Fiennes may not have “made a definitive Coriolanus,” he’s made a “sensationally gripping one,” said David Edelstein in New York. Updating any of Shakespeare’s great tragedies is risky, but as a first-time director, the actor captures “the pulse of the play,” managing to tell “a damn good story.” Fiennes occupies the title role, playing a contemporary war hero who doesn’t adjust well to a second career in politics and plots revenge when he’s banished from his homeland. The film’s “relentless emphasis on pacing” sacrifices some of the play’s slow-gathering power, said Stephen Whitty in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. Shakespeare’s language sometimes even feels rushed, “swirling past us before we have the full chance of appreciating its intricate imagery.” But the acting saves the picture, said Stephanie Zacharek in Movieline.com. Fiennes is “charismatic in a chilly way,” while Vanessa Redgrave, as his warrior-queen mother, “makes even the play’s densest language seem as if it were written yesterday.” In signing up Redgrave, Fiennes “hired the best.” She’s “modernity and timelessness in one magnificent package.”