Dazzling, reverent and audacious at once, and a beautiful telling of a beautiful story

Rating: 9/10 (5 May 2013)

Romeo + Juliet (1996)
Spellbinding. Pushes hard at the limits of a contemporary kind of Shakespeare while still keeping all the intense rivalry and romance. It's sometimes awkward, improbable, and even ridiculous if you don't jump in and just go with it. But if this is at all up your alley in spirit or in a love of the original play forever finding new turf, you might just be blown away.
I was. I saw it the first time late at night traveling and a bit bored and restless and from the first scene to the last I forgot the world and was twisted and pushed and amazed. You might be able to say any one actor--like Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo or Claire Danes as Juliet--is breathtaking, though many certainly are superb. What you find is the movie itself is the star, rapidly conjoining unlikely scenes and making individual contributions flare and sizzle in jarring succession. The filming, too--under veteran Donald McAlpine--is gorgeous and original without being distracting.
Shakespeare deserves some credit here, taking a classic problem and turning it into an archetypal drama. The problem is just when two people fall in love from different sides of the tracks. The drama, of course, is the eventual suicides out of pure love. If you don't know the story and I've ruined the ending, I'm sorry. (I won't say who kills themselves.)
See this? Yes. Yes. Yes. But be warned--it starts with such a bizarre boundary pushing adaptation of the classic confrontations in modern gang terms you might just say, woah, this is stupid and horrible. You really might. But if you can hang in there until you get the two title characters going, and get them to meet, you'll at least know how deliberate and creative the whole movie's style is.