---
title: "Hamlet"
year: 2000
kind: "film"
canonical: "https://film.one/film/hamlet-2000"
fi1m_id: "hamlet-2000"
imdb_id: "tt0171359"
tmdb_id: 10688
wikidata_id: "Q1393651"
fi1m_score: 68
critics_score: 63
critics_reviews: 10
published: "2026-09-22T20:59:16.352742+00:00"
updated: "2026-09-22T20:59:17.325566+00:00"
region: "US"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Hamlet (2000)

Directed by Michael Almereyda · 1h 52m · MPA R · Drama, Thriller

## Identity

Hamlet

- **Canonical:** https://film.one/film/hamlet-2000
- **Type:** Film
- **Fi1m ID:** hamlet-2000
- **IMDb ID:** tt0171359
- **TMDB ID:** 10688
- **Wikidata ID:** Q1393651
- **Same entity:** https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0171359/, https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/10688, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1393651

**Fi1m score: 68** · Critics 63 from 10 reviews

*In a sentence:* The ghost arrives on the security cameras and the prince answers him with a camcorder; Manhattan shrugs and goes back to work

> Michael Almereyda’s corporate-Manhattan *Hamlet* is a proper idea rather than a change of costume, and the cameras, the hotel and Bill Murray’s Polonius make it worth an evening. Ethan Hawke’s murmuring prince is the soft centre of a sharp film.

## Synopsis

New York, 2000. The Denmark Corporation has a new chief executive. Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan) has buried his brother, married the widow, Gertrude (Diane Venora), and moved into the Hotel Elsinore within the month. Hamlet (Ethan Hawke), the dead man’s son, comes home from film school in a woolly hat with a toy video camera and refuses to take any of it well. His friend Horatio (Karl Geary) has seen something on the hotel’s security cameras at night that looks like Hamlet’s father. Meanwhile Polonius (Bill Murray), the company’s fixer, warns his daughter Ophelia (Julia Stiles) off the prince and sends his son Laertes (Liev Schreiber) back to Paris with a list of rules for living. Hamlet is told what happened to his father, and asked to do something about it.

## Review

Michael Almereyda moves *Hamlet* to Manhattan in the year 2000 and cuts it to 112 minutes. Denmark is a corporation, Elsinore is a hotel, and the prince is a film-school dropout who carries a toy camera everywhere and talks to it more readily than to people. It is a real idea, not a change of costume, and for long stretches it works. Where it falls short is at the centre. Ethan Hawke gives us a Hamlet so withdrawn that the play’s engine, a mind that cannot stop, seems to be running in another room.

Start with what is good. The ghost comes in over the closed-circuit cameras, and surveillance runs through the whole film: Polonius wires Ophelia for sound, Claudius watches his nephew on monitors, everyone is recorded by somebody. Almereyda has noticed that the play was already about being watched and has given the watchers the equipment. The play within the play becomes a short film Hamlet edits from old tapes and screens for the family, the cleverest thing in the picture and, oddly, one of the most faithful.

Gideon Ponte builds the Denmark Corporation out of glass and grey carpet and the Hotel Elsinore out of beige rooms with expensive lamps, and gives Hamlet a flat piled with screens and cassettes. John de Borman shoots the city at night through windows, so faces are laid over traffic and neon and the reflections do some of the work the speeches used to. Carter Burwell’s score is low and sparse, strings and a piano that never quite settles, the right choice for a film this quiet. Kristina Boden cuts fast, and the speed costs something: the text is trimmed hard, sometimes mid-thought, and a couple of the famous speeches arrive already half over.

“To be or not to be” is delivered in the Action aisle of a Blockbuster, the prince pacing past shelves of shrink-wrapped explosions. It is a good joke and it means something too, since the speech is about doing nothing and he is surrounded by the opposite. But Hawke murmurs it, as he murmurs most of the part. He has the face for a sad prince and none of the danger. We never believed this Hamlet could hurt anyone, and the play needs us to believe he might.

The supporting cast carries him. Bill Murray plays Polonius as a middle manager who has given the same advice at a great many dinners and half believes it, and his farewell to Laertes, delivered while helping him into his coat, is the warmest scene in the film. We laughed at the old fool and then felt for him, which is the order Shakespeare intended. Julia Stiles makes Ophelia a sullen, watchful teenager who photographs everything and says little. Kyle MacLachlan’s Claudius is a smooth chief executive back from a good lunch, and Liev Schreiber speaks the verse as though he has done it before. Diane Venora is given too little to do as Gertrude. Jeffrey Wright turns up late as the Gravedigger for a couple of minutes and makes them count.

The moment that got at us was small. Hamlet alone in his flat, playing back home video of his parents on a little screen, rewinding, playing it again, saying nothing. Hawke is better silent than speaking, and in that scene the whole business of a son who cannot move on is on his face without a line. We were moved, and slightly annoyed that the film had not found more scenes like it. In the long middle stretch, men in suits talking across tables, we drifted and watched the city behind them.

Baz Luhrmann did modern-dress Shakespeare at full volume four years earlier with [*Romeo + Juliet*](https://film.one/film/romeo-juliet). Almereyda does it at a mutter, and there is something honest in that. Against Olivier’s or Branagh’s films it is a sketch, but a sketch with a dozen images you will remember.

Watch it with the play half remembered rather than fully. It is short enough that its thin patches pass quickly. Bring patience for the prince; everyone around him is doing better work than he is, which is the family’s complaint too.

*Fi1m score 68, published 22 September 2026.*

## What the critics say

Most critics lean warm on Michael Almereyda’s decision to move the play to corporate Manhattan, with the first American notices the most enthusiastic. Praise clusters on the setting itself: the city treated as a character, the surveillance cameras and video diaries that lend the prince his paranoia, and the way modern trappings make familiar lines sound new. The supporting cast is the other point of agreement, Bill Murray’s Polonius and Julia Stiles’s Ophelia singled out even by reviewers who like little else.

The reservations gather around Ethan Hawke. Several reviews find his slacker prince too passive to hold the centre, and the harsher notices say much of the cast cannot speak the verse. Others feel the cutting truncates the story, blunts its political edge and never reaches tragic weight. The spread is wide, from the Los Angeles Times’s near-rave to Total Film calling it tedious and crass, with the later British reviews markedly cooler than the American ones.

## Straight answers

**Is Hamlet worth watching?**

*Hamlet* (2000) is worth an evening for anyone who knows the play and wants to see it done as a corporate thriller in Manhattan, and we scored it 68. Michael Almereyda's surveillance idea, Bill Murray's Polonius and Gideon Ponte's glass-and-grey-carpet Denmark Corporation are the reasons to watch; Ethan Hawke's murmuring prince is the reason it falls short of a full recommendation.

**How long is Hamlet, and what is it rated?**

*Hamlet* runs 1h 52m and is rated R by the MPA in the US. It is a drama and thriller film.

**Where can I watch Hamlet in the US?**

*Hamlet* is not on any streaming or rental service in the US at the moment. It is available in 16 other countries; change your country at the top of the page to see where. Availability is checked daily.

**How violent or frightening is Hamlet, and is it suitable for children?**

*Hamlet* (2000) carries a US R certificate and has no UK certificate, so treat it as a film for adults rather than children. It is talky rather than bloody, a quiet modern-dress Shakespeare set in offices, hotel rooms and a video shop, and our main complaint is that Hawke's prince never seems capable of hurting anyone. The harder barrier for teenagers is the fast-cut, heavily trimmed verse.

**How does Hamlet compare to Romeo + Juliet?**

*Hamlet* (2000) and [*Romeo + Juliet*](https://film.one/film/romeo-juliet) both put Shakespeare in modern dress, but Almereyda does it at a mutter where Luhrmann does it at full volume. Luhrmann's is the more moving film, carried by DiCaprio and Danes even when the editing crowds them; Almereyda's is the sharper idea with the softer centre. Choose *Romeo + Juliet* for romance and noise, *Hamlet* for security cameras and Bill Murray.

**What should I watch after Hamlet?**

After *Hamlet*, try [*Romeo + Juliet*](https://film.one/film/romeo-juliet) (1996, Fi1m 82): Luhrmann’s Verona Beach does the modern-dress trick loud where Almereyda does it quietly. Then [*Coriolanus*](https://film.one/film/coriolanus) (2011, Fi1m 74): Ralph Fiennes puts the Roman play in a Balkan war zone and keeps the verse.

### Reviews we read (10)

- **Los Angeles Times** (90/100, inferred): The critic highlights the vigor, insight, and originality of setting the story in present-day Manhattan, making Shakespeare accessible and provocative. Hawke delivers a superb performance as a youthful yet insightful prince in a gritty indie-style production. [Read](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-12-ca-29118-story.html)
- **The New York Times**, Elvis Mitchell (85/100, inferred): The critic praises Almereyda for rooting the adaptation in contemporary Manhattan, turning the city into a complex character full of beauty and squalor. The film is described as a vital, sharply intelligent update layered with paranoia from constant surveillance technology. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/12/movies/film-review-a-simpler-melancholy.html)
- **The Guardian**, Peter Bradshaw (80/100, inferred): The critic praises this stylish, inventive modern-dress Hamlet set in corporate New York as an intelligent and energetic take that refreshingly defamiliarises the play. He singles out the strong supporting turns, especially Julia Stiles as Ophelia and Bill Murray as Polonius, while noting some issues with the handling of soliloquies and loss of political edge. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/dec/15/1)
- **The New Yorker**, David Denby (80/100, inferred): The critic is charmed and gripped by the modern-dress staging in corporate New York, calling it a ripely melancholy version that is not a travesty despite some contemporary translations. It features a mischievous intelligence and sullen beauty, with effective use of video and setting. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/05/15/flesh-and-blood)
- **Time Out**, TCh (72/100, inferred): The film updates the story to contemporary New York with a slacker prince using gadgets and media, modernizing and streamlining the play without trivializing it. It amplifies poetic melodrama with ingenuity and energy but fails to muster tragic grandeur. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/hamlet-3)
- **The AV Club**, Scott Tobias (60/100, inferred): The critic notes that Almereyda's modern corporate New York transposition is often a mess with a truncated story and mangled dialogue, but praises its inventive staging that uses incongruities between Shakespearean language and contemporary banality to illuminating effect. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/hamlet-1798195287)
- **Variety** (55/100, inferred): The review finds the slacker prince a weak center in an otherwise conceptually vivid contemporary update, with fine support performances but an oft-ludicrous portrait. It is sporadically striking but never fully engrossing, with strong tech aspects. [Read](https://variety.com/2000/film/reviews/hamlet-11-1200460158/)
- **Evening Standard** (40/100, inferred): The critic views the updated version as shallow and reductive despite some inventive gimmickry, with an atmosphere of corporate sleaze and a failure by most of the cast to deliver Shakespeare's verse effectively. They single out the innovative use of CCTV and digital cameras as the production's best feature. [Read](https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/film/hamlet-7433409.html)
- **Total Film** (20/100, inferred): The critic finds Almereyda's modern update tedious and crass, with a stifling production design that feels alienating and a cast unable to deliver the material convincingly. They single out the drab scenery and lacklustre performances, particularly Ethan Hawke as Hamlet, as major failings. [Read](https://www.gamesradar.com/hamlet-review/)
- **Eye for Film**, Angus Wolfe Murray (35/100, inferred): The modern-dress update with technology gimmicks fails to make Hamlet more interesting, and Ethan Hawke lacks the necessary danger and energy as the prince. Bill Murray provides some compensation in a supporting role. [Read](https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/hamlet-film-review-by-angus-wolfe-murray)

## Details

- **Director:** Michael Almereyda
- **Director:** Michael Almereyda
- **Cinematography:** John de Borman
- **Editor:** Kristina Boden
- **Music:** Carter Burwell
- **Production design:** Gideon Ponte
- **Producer:** Andrew Fierberg, Amy Hobby
- **Cast:** Ethan Hawke as Hamlet; Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius; Diane Venora as Gertrude; Liev Schreiber as Laertes; Julia Stiles as Ophelia; Bill Murray as Polonius; Karl Geary as Horatio; Steve Zahn as Rosencrantz
- **Runtime:** 1h 52m
- **Certificate (MPA):** R
- **Release (the US):** 12 May 2000
- **Genres:** Drama, Thriller
- **Budget:** $2 million
- **Box office:** $2 million

## Where to watch in the US

Not streaming, renting or buying in the US at the last check.

Also available in: AU, BG, CZ, EE, GB, GR, IE, IL, LT, MY, NZ, PH, PL, PT, UA, ZA. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country.

## If you liked this

- *Romeo + Juliet* (1996), Fi1m 82: Luhrmann’s Verona Beach does the modern-dress trick loud where Almereyda does it quietly — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/romeo-juliet.md)
- *Throne of Blood* (1957): Kurosawa’s Macbeth in feudal Japan, proof that Shakespeare survives losing every word
- *Richard III* (1995): Ian McKellen’s fascist 1930s England, the sharpest of the relocated Shakespeares
- *Haider* (2014): Hamlet in 1990s Kashmir, with the politics Almereyda’s version leaves out
- *Coriolanus* (2011), Fi1m 74: Ralph Fiennes puts the Roman play in a Balkan war zone and keeps the verse — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/coriolanus.md)

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/hamlet-2000