Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

MissSimonetta While the Japanese setting seems like more of a gimmick than anything, this 2006 adaptation of As You Like It is treated much too harshly in my opinion.Bryce Dallas is charming and funny as Rosalind, while David Oyelowo is sweet and hilarious as Orlando. The two have excellent chemistry. Romola Garai and Alfred Molina are great as as Celia and Touchstone, the two funniest characters in this version. And Brian Blessed, well, he's always excellent and here he gets the chance to wear samurai armor in the opening. About my only complaint cast-wise is Kevin Kline as Jacques; he does not leave the impact he should and disappears into the forest scenery.The settings and costumes are beautiful, as to be expected from a Branagh Shakespeare production. The comedy is well-done altogether, though once the film is over, it does not leave the impression it should. I don't know, it's missing something that the 1979 Helen Mirren version had. Maybe it's because this version cuts so much of the material out in an attempt to make it more accessible to a mainstream (and presumably young) audience. Worth watching though.

Katherina_Minola There are some excellent synopses of this story online, but in essence it concerns the love between Rosalind, the daughter of Duke Senior, who is usurped from his court by his brother Duke Frederick. Rosalind is forced to leave the court – accompanied by her friend Celia, daughter of Frederick – and live in the forest, where Orlando, who was lovestruck from the first moment that he met Rosalind, is trying to find her. As with many of Shakespeare's plays, mistaken identity is a factor – Rosalind pretends to be a boy named 'Ganymede' and offers counsel to Orlando, to help him get over Rosalind. Around this central story are other sub-plots of love, romance, and the search for happiness and meaning.In this version, the story is transported to Japan – this was a move which received mixed reviews. For my part, I thought it worked beautifully, affording some wonderful scenery, which was photographed beautifully. Bryce Dallas Howard was beyond stunning as Rosalind – she was luminous, and it was easy to see how Orlando became so entranced by her. Romola Garai played Celia, Rosalind's best friend, and was great in the part, amply demonstrating why she is carving out a career as a respected actress. In truth, it is hard to select just one member of the cast as stand-out, as they were uniformly excellent. Brian Blessed starred as both Duke Senior and Duke Frederick, and made the two characters very distinctive, showing the harshness and cruelty of Frederick, and the kindly gentleness of Senior. Kevin Kline shines as a melancholy lord, and Alfred Molina puts in a great turn as Touchstone, a court fool (jester of sorts) who accompanies Rosalind and Celia when they leave the court. Other terrific performances include David Oyelowo as Orlando and Adrian Lester as Oliver (Orlando's brother).I also loved the epilogue in which the fourth wall is well and truly broken in a lovely way. Overall, this was a delightful, colourful, romantic adaptation of one of Shakespeare's comedies, and I highly recommend it both to fans and non-fans of the Bard.

tedg Here's one of the most intriguing challenges in all the lands of imagination.Shakespeare invented much of what it means to be a modern human. But he did so in a very constrained way of communicating. The plays were all about language and geometry on how the come to us, and within that vessel he grew images. That sparseness was what allowed him to shape the language so finely, thus creating the poetic spins that find valence in us.Okay. If you have seen Shakespeare done as it originally was, you'll know what I mean. The plays work well when read silently or aloud as well. But how to translate to cinema? How to take something that is not visual until it enters us, and make it visual before it enters us and make the same magic?I love how people have tried. Most modern stage productions follow this cinematic challenge as well because now we are a visual society. Jarman, Greenaway, Luhrman and Taymor have done marvelous things with this challenge. Branaugh is from a different stripe, a sideways approach to this problem. He sometimes moves into pure cinema (Kate's mirrored Ophelia rant, the horses in "Much Ado") but he's primarily worried about stagecraft as theatrically defined. Here he does something different, something so ambitious I'm trilled to be alive for it. Its so clever.I did not see this at an appointed time, but stumbled on it after a discouraging day. In a sense, it saved my life. It really did. I watched the whole thing with one of those openmouthed grins.Here's what he did. He transported the setting to Japan and adjusted everything accordingly. Simple idea. No, its not just Shakespeare with different clothes. Its not just the plot fleshed out with some other setting. Its a translation to a visual expression. Japan has spent a few hundred years building, refining and constraining a visual grammar in much the same way that Northern Europeans did with language. We lose much of what we associate with the plays, that verbal poetry. What we get in its stead is something similar but visually rooted. To establish this of course you have to "show strong" in the beginning, and he does with a completely wordless intrusion, an invasion of guess what? A play!This Rosalind is exquisite, someone who knows how to shape the space around her the way British actors carefully shape their words. She anchors the whole thing, including an amazing epilogue. Really, you should save this for when you need your life saved, when you need to stroke down melancholy burrs. Though Branaugh ends with his familiar happydance, by then you will be ready for it, ready to fall in love all over again.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

jshoaf I got interested in Western views of Japan in the 19th century a few years ago, so I knew a bit about the milieu Branagh purports to have chosen for his adaptation of Shakespeare's "As you like it." Well, I can see why he went for it: like Elizabethan theater, Kabuki has men playing the roles of women; there is wrestling in the play, so you can have a sumo wrestler; there are notes hung from trees, and that is something the Japanese know how to do properly; and everybody can dance around in gorgeous kimono at the end. Full stop. There is no attempt at all to think about Westerners in Japan, about the Japanese vs. the Elizabethan concept of nature (Arden looked like California to me), and they didn't even bother to get the sumo referee properly dressed. I didn't see anything at all remotely suggesting Yokohama (compare the wonderful scenes in Last Samurai). The colors were wrong. This Japan is as inauthentic as can be.So what? It's a marvelously directed film which kept the plot chugging along in full sight, the wonderful speeches singing, and the dialogue hilarious. The actors were all golden, golden. It was just fun. My son got hooked by seeing Olivier's Henry V as a child, my daughter by Branagh's Much Ado about Nothing. I think I want to be sure a copy of this one is available for my grandson.