Macbeth (2015)

Justin Kurzel’s blistering, blood-sticky new screen version of Macbeth unseams the famous Shakespearean tragedy open from the nave to the chops, letting its insides spill out across the rock underfoot.

Fearsomely visceral and impeccably performed, it’s a brisk, bracing update, even as it remains exquisitely in period.

Inspired, innovative, stunning, with unforgettable performances and images, this is up there with the great screen Shakespeares. The playwright surely would be thrilled with it in its full-blooded vigour.

Aided by intensely committed performances from a uniformly brilliant cast, all fielding Scottish accents, Kurzel's genius is to be able to find clean lines of dramatic connection and motivation within the existing text and then to interpret those imaginatively, without becoming simplistic and without compromise.

Artfully, his films tracks the tragic decline of a good man gone bad, who finds murder too insignificant not to do again and again, a worthy addition to William Shakespeare's ever growing filmography.