10 Films to Watch if You Like All Is True

One good film leads to another and Cinema Paradiso is the perfect place to follow up your favourite movies by searching for other titles along similar lines. So far, we've made suggestions for those who enjoyed The Greatest Showman, Stan & Ollie and A Star Is Born. Now, we invite you to follow the trails leading from Kenneth Branagh's William Shakespeare biopic, All Is True.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, William Shakespeare is the most filmed author in cinema history. Over 420 adaptations of his plays and sonnets have reached the screen since William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Walter Pfeffer Dando recorded Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree performing scenes from King John in the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company's open-air studio on the Thames Embankment in London in September 1899. This landmark production can be found on the BFI's Silent Shakespeare (1999) and Play On! Shakespeare in Silent Film (2016) collections, which stands alongside Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1992) among the best Bard-inspired titles available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.

The Glover's Son From Henley Street

As the nephew of respected Tudor historian GR Elton, Ben Elton has long been familiar with the life and times of William Shakespeare. Whether taking a frivolous approach to the Bard's travails in Stratford and Southwark in Upstart Crow (2016-18) or offering considered insights into his twilight on the banks of the Avon in All Is True (2018), Elton likes to dot the action with references to the 39 plays that Shakespeare is known to have authored.

Another lifelong devotee is a joiner's son from Belfast. Kenneth Branagh has directed screen versions of Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996), Love's Labour's Lost (2000) and As You Like It (2006). Therefore, Elton and Branagh appear to be the ideal double-act to speculate upon the little-known period that followed the fire that destroyed the Globe Theatre on 29 June 1613 during a performance of Henry VIII, which is also known by its alternative title, All Is True.

Of course, Branagh is not the first actor to play Shakespeare on screen. Reginald Gardiner put in an appearance in Irwin Allen's ambitious saga, The Story of Mankind (1957), before Tim Curry got an extended crack at playing the lead in the 1978 ITV series, Will Shakespeare (1978), which was scripted by John Mortimer to suggest how six of the timeless plays were written.

Mortimer invented a judge's wife to be the Dark Lady to whom the Sonnets were written and their genesis is further explored by novelist William Boyd in John McKay's A Waste of Shame (2005), which places Shakespeare (Rupert Graves) in the middle of a triangle with William Herbert (Tom Sturridge) and Lucie (Indira Varma), who has just arrived in London from France. The newcomers are the Doctor (David Tennant) and Martha (Freema Agyeman) in 'The Shakespeare Code', a 2007 episode of Doctor Who, which is set in 1599 and sees the Bard (Dean Lennox Kelly) help confound a trio of Carronites posing as the witches Lilith, Doomfinger and Bloodtide.

It's commonly believed that Cervantes and Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and they are played by Juan Luis Gallardo and Will Kemp in Inés Paris's Miguel y William (2007), which should surely have received a DVD release in this country. Rafe Spall was cast as Shakespeare in Roland Emmerich's Anonymous (2011), in which he seeks to prove the authorship of his plays in the face of claims by the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans). But the mood is much lighter as Matthew Baynton plays a third-rate Stratford lute player who heads to London to make his fortune in Richard Bracewell's Bill (2015), a study of Shakespeare's 'lost years' by the people behind the TV series, Horrible Histories (2009-16) and Yonderland (2013-16).

A statue of Bill Shakespeare (Patrick Stewart) comes to life in Kelly Asbury's Gnomeo & Juliet (2011) in order to outlines the plot of his play about star-crossed lovers, while Stratford's favourite son is voiced by Jorma Taccone, as he takes a ride on a rocket chair in Cloud Cuckoo Land with Michelangelo and Abraham Lincoln in Phil Lord's The Lego Movie (2014).

A Home Town Tale

Although Ben Elton had been writing Upstart Crow for three years, he had no intention of making a serious drama about the playwright. He had worked with Branagh a quarter of a century earlier, in playing Verges to Michael Keaton's Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. But it was while Branagh was guesting in the dual role of Colin the jingly hat seller and the mysterious Stranger in 'A Crow Christmas Carol', which completed the third season of the BBC sitcom, that he suggested a feature about the last three years of Shakespeare's life.

Feeling the need to make an intimate picture between Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and his forthcoming Disney adaptation of Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl, Branagh followed the promptings of Paul Edmondson's book, Shakespeare and His Circle, to focus on the unfinished business he had with his estranged wife, Anne Hathaway (Judi Dench), and their daughters, Susanna (Lydia Wilson) and Judith (Kathryn Wilder), whom he had barely seen since the death of the latter's twin and Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet (Sam Ellis).

Having played Leontes alongside Dench in a stage production of A Winter's Tale, Branagh also wondered whether the pain this character felt at losing a son reflected Shakespeare's own grief. Elton told one interviewer that Branagh had asked him to 'consider a man wondering about his legacy, what he meant to his family and what his family meant to him'. As a result, Elton followed the literary tradition established by Alexandre Duval's Shakespeare amoureux (1804), Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon's No Bed For Bacon (1941), Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun (1964) and Faye Kellerman's The Quality of Mercy (1989), and continued by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman's Oscar-winning screenplay for John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998), by creating a 'fiction based on truth'.

When Branagh was 16, he had hitch-hiked from Reading to Stratford-upon-Avon to visit the places associated with Shakespeare and see as many plays as he could. It mattered a good deal, therefore, that the setting for All Is True should be as authentic as possible. As New Place had been demolished by the Reverend Francis Gastrell in a fit of pique in 1759 and it was not, presumably, possible to film in Thomas Nash's once-adjoining house on Chapel Street, production designer James Merifield set about turning the 15th-century manor house of Dorney Court, near Windsor, into a Jacobean family home.

Paul Edmondson, who is head of research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, was particularly impressed with the way that Merifield and set decorator Hannah Spice recreated this lost corner of Stratford, as well as the garden that Shakespeare seeks to create as a memorial to his 11 year-old son. As Branagh refused to contemplate computer-generated imagery, matte paintings were produced on glass by Ingo Putze and Shannon Burkley to create views that could be positioned in front of the camera to blend in with the natural scenery.

As Branagh also wished to use daylight and candlelight, cinematographer Zac Nicholson persuaded him to employ a digital format rather than celluloid for the first time in his directing career. Stanley Kubrick had commissioned special candles to achieve the right light in Barry Lyndon (1975), but Branagh didn't have the luxury of being able to indulge such perfectionism. Nevertheless, Nicholson's lighting, particularly during the intense tête-à-tête between Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen), has a chiaroscuro delicacy that recalls the paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer.

A canvas in the National Portrait Gallery inspired Branagh's visual interpretation of the Bard. Painted by John Taylor in 1610, the so-called 'Chandos Portrait' was the first picture acquired by the gallery on its founding in 1856 and Branagh based the playwright's gentle demeanour on the stillness he saw in his eyes. Initially, he had intended to use minimal make-up. But, even after he opted to go down the prosthetic route, Branagh decided against using contact lenses, as he wanted his inner emotions to shine through. The trademark look (interestingly sans earring) was designed by prosthetics expert Neill Gorton and make-up specialist Vanessa White, who had to spend around two hours applying the latex and facial hair first thing in the morning so that Branagh could go from directing to acting without any costly hold-ups.

Having won an Oscar for his work on Saul Dibb's The Duchess (2008) and proved equally period savvy in Justin Chadwick's Tulip Fever (2017), Michael O'Connor was a natural choice to design the costumes. He performed a minor miracle in capturing the distinctive fashions of James I's reign in just four weeks. His crowning achievement, perhaps, is the tall hat worn by Sir Thomas Lucy (Alex Macqueen) to emphasise the Puritan hypocrisy of the local MP, which is completely lacking in the Christian charity his headgear supposedly denotes.

Is All Is True All True?

The 'If You Like' part of this article's title implies that you have already seen All Is True. If not, look away now, as there are a clutch of spoilers coming up (or historical notes and queries, if you prefer).

It's one of the great literary puzzles that, while so many of his plays and poems have survived, there is such a scarcity of factual evidence about the life of William Shakespeare. He is now hailed as a genius. Yet, when he died on his birthday, he was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford rather than in a place of high honour in Westminster Abbey. Even his doctor-cum-diarist son-in-law, John Hall (Hadley Fraser), felt no compunction to mention details of his home life or the cause of his death in his journal.

The modern obsession with celebrity has possibly corrupted our concept of status. But it seems that Shakespeare was allowed to disappear into the sunset after the trauma of witnessing the Globe go up in smoke. After all, the population of Stratford in this period was only around 2500 and, with so few people being able to read or write, it's likely that the achievements of the local boy done good meant little or nothing to neighbours who associated the name Shakespeare with his father John's fall from grace.

Branagh has suggested that Shakespeare returned home because he had written himself out and wanted to build bridges with the family members he had neglected during his prolonged absences in London. Yet, Professor Stanley Wells has claimed that Shakespeare was a prototype commuter, who went to the capital only when he had cause to be there. As an actor, he would have been free throughout Lent, when the theatres were closed. He was also allowed time away by Richard Burbage's company to write and Wells intimates that the fact Shakespeare only ever had temporary lodgings in London meant that he considered himself primarily to be a Stratfordian.

This perhaps explains his eagerness to get a coat of arms, so that he could pass himself off as a gentleman in the face of Lucy's taunts about his father's criminality and his own rumoured poaching of deer from the from Charlecote Park estate. It should also be noted that Shakespeare possibly lampooned Lucy as Justice Shallow, who was played by Alan Webb in Orson Welles's Chimes At Midnight (1965), which was brilliantly pieced together from scenes from Henry IV, Parts I, and II as well as Richard II, Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor - all of which are available in various versions from Cinema Paradiso.

Shallow also features in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is mentioned by Anne Hathaway as the comedy that her husband had written immediately after their son's death in August 1596. Branagh has revealed that the play on names with Hamlet had prompted Ben Elton into both inverting the spectral father/son encounter on the battlements of Elsinore and appropriating Ophelia's drowning as the method of Hamnet's death. There's no mention of a cause in the parish register, so Shakespeare is able to challenge Anne and Judith about their assertion that Hamnet had succumbed to bubonic plague after noticing that there had only been a handful of deaths in the town during that summer, when over 200 had perished when the disease had struck in 1564.

This detective element of the story leads neatly into its feminist subtext, as Judith reveals that Hamnet had killed himself after she had threatened to expose the fact that she had composed the poetry that their father had always presumed was penned by his chip-off-the-block heir. As Judith was unable to write, she had asked her twin to copy the verses down for her and had been unable to tell Shakespeare the truth because he had felt the loss of his son so keenly for the last 17 years. In fact, neither sibling composed any poetry, but Elton and Branagh borrow a conceit first posited by Virginia Woolf in the essay 'Shakespeare's Sister', which appears in A Room of One's Own (1929), to question attitudes to female literacy in Shakespeare's times (and, in certain cultures, in our own).

Elton also seems indebted to Carol Ann Duffy's poem, 'Anne Hathaway', for his interpretation of the infamous passage in Shakespeare's will about the bequest of his 'second best bed'. However, he offers a novel view of Anne's envy of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, whom she suspects of being the 'the Dark Lady' (or, more likely, the 'Fair Youth') mentioned in the Sonnets, which Shakespeare protests were published illegally without his permission. Despite affording Branagh his first opportunity to act opposite Sir Ian McKellen - who credits the success of Branagh's Shakespeare adaptations with his determination to transfer his stage success into Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1995) - this meeting never actually took place, as the social conventions of the day would never have allowed a nobleman to drop in on an actor-writer, even if he was his patron and the dedicatee of the narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594).

This exchange of affectionate tokens hints at the love that dared not speak its name, although homosexuality was less frowned upon in Shakespeare's day than it was for much of the ensuing four centuries, However, Elton is quick to expose the double standards pertaining to female modesty, as he explores the sexual scandals that enveloped both of Shakespeare's daughters.

Susanna was accused of adultery with haberdasher Rafe Smith (John Dagleish) by religious zealot John Lane (Sean Foley) and went to the church court in Worcester on 15 July 1613 to sue him for slander. As in the film, Lane failed to appear, although it's unlikely that he was scared off by a protective father spinning a tall tale. There is no evidence that the affair ever took place, however, and none whatsoever that Susanna contracted syphilis, as the purchase of mercury would seem to suggest. But, why let the facts stand in the way of a good story?

Her sister's shame is a matter of record, however. Judith married wine merchant Tom Quiney (Jack Colgrave Hirst) on 10 February 1616, only for it to emerge a month later that he had fathered a child with Margaret Wheeler. They both died during the birth, but Quiney had to perform a public penance. When Judith delivered her own son, he was named Shakespeare Quiney, but he only lived for six months. The family line ended when Susanna's daughter, Elizabeth (Clara Duczmal), died without issue on 17 February 1670. It's doubtful whether any of her grandfather's verses were spoken at her funeral. But 'Fear No More' from Cymbeline was most certainly not read by Anne, Susanna and Judith at Shakespeare's requiem, as is depicted in the film.

The Best of the Bard

Space doesn't permit a full rundown of the various screen adaptations of Shakespeare's works. After all, there are around 80 different Hamlets, over 50 Romeo and Juliets and almost 40 Macbeths. You can search the Cinema Paradiso database for these and other versions available to rent. But certain interpretations stand out, with five names dominating the field: Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa (more of whom in the next section), Grigori Kozintsev and Kenneth Branagh.

Renowned as the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation, Olivier earned a special Academy Award for his wartime production of Henry V (1944), for which he was also nominated for Best Actor. He completed a hat-trick with Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955), as he became the first person to direct themselves to an Oscar with the Danish saga that also took Best Picture. In very different times, Olivier wore blackface to take the lead in Stuart Burge's Othello (1965) before he returned in the television age to play Shylock in John Sichel's The Merchant of Venice (1973) and the abdicating monarch in Michael Elliott's King Lear (1983).

While Olivier adopted a very traditional approach, Welles proved bolder in his attitude towards the text and the visuals. Although no one mentions his 1933 short colour version of Twelfth Night, details of his legendary stage productions can be found in such documentaries as Chuck Workman's Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles (2014) and Mark Cousins's The Eyes of Orson Welles (2018). But his cinematic adaptations are just as riveting, whether he is recasting Macbeth (1947) as a film noir or piecing together a production of Othello (1952) over four years. His masterpiece, however, was his aforementioned Chimes At Midnight, in which he excels as Sir John Falstaff.

Having produced several important films with Leonid Trauberg (some under the banner of FEKS, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor), Grigori Kozintsev followed a peerless adaptation of Cervantes's Don Quixote (1957) with innovative versions of Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970). Filmed in Sovscope widescreen and featuring Innokenty Smoktunovsky as the Prince of Denmark, the former won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for its striking visual style and a bold approach to the theme of power, which recurred in a Lear that was also based on a translation by Boris Pasternak and boasted a score by Dimitri Shostakovich, as well as a towering lead by the Estonian actor, Jüri Järvet.

Although Branagh assumed Olivier's crown as Britain's chief screen interpreter of the Bard, one should never forget the contribution made by John Gielgud. Having guested uncredited as the Ghost in Olivier's Hamlet, he impressed as Cassius alongside Marlon Brando's Mark Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar (1953), although he would later take the title role in Stuart Burge's 1970 adaptation, with Charlton Heston playing Antony. Gielgud next served as the Chorus (a role he would reprise for the BBC in 1979) in Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet (1954), which paired Laurence Harvey and Susan Shentall, before teaming with Ralph Richardson to play the dukes of Clarence and Buckingham in Olivier's Richard III. In addition to essaying Henry IV in Chimes At Midnight, Gielgud also played John of Gaunt in the BBC take on Richard II (1978) and the lead in Prospero's Books (1991), Peter Greenaway's vivid reworking of The Tempest, which had been memorably adapted by Derek Jarman in 1979 and had climaxed with Elizabeth Welch singing 'Stormy Weather' while surrounded by sailors. Gielgud also popped up as King Priam in Branagh's Hamlet.

Among the other Shakespeares with a British connection to look out for are Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew (1967) and Romeo and Juliet (1968), which respectively paired Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey; Tony Richardson's Hamlet (1969), with Nicol Williamson; Peter Brook's King Lear (1971), with Paul Scofield; Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971), with Jon Finch; Trevor Nunn's Antony and Cleopatra (1974), with Richard Johnson and Janet Suzman; Philip Casson's Macbeth (1978), with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench (who also both appear in Peter Walker and John Carlaw's Playing Shakespeare, 1982); Adrian Noble (1996) and Michael Hoffman's (1999) versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream; Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), with Anthony Hopkins; Christine Edzard's The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream (2001); Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice (2004), with Al Pacino; Julie Taymor's The Tempest (2010), with Helen Mirren; Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus (2011); and the BBC's epic all-star series, The Hollow Crown (2012-16), which covered the plays contained in both the Henriad and the Wars of the Roses cycle.

Shakespeare in Disguise

Don't think for a second that we've forgotten about items like Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990), with Mel Gibson; Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes; Geoffrey Wright's Macbeth (2006), with Sam Worthington; Justin Kurzel's Macbeth (2015), with Michael Fassbinder and Marion Cotillard; or Joss Weedon's wonderful ensemble comedy, Much Ado About Nothing (2012). But, with so many Shakespeare adaptations to choose from, we have to draw a line somewhere.

Before we get on to our 10 recommendations for further viewing, however, we should take a detour to check on some of those movies that have been inspired by Shakespeare plays. Kenneth Branagh produced one of the best in the 1995 comedy, In the Bleak Midwinter, about a troupe of actors in the Derbyshire town of Hope gathering at the parish church at Christmastide to rehearse Hamlet. The same play has also shaped the action in Aki Kaurismäki's Hamlet Goes Business (1987), in which a playboy slacker wages a boardroom war to prevent his scheming uncle from trying to corner the rubber duck market, and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), which switches the scene to corporate Manhattan to chronicle Ethan Hawke's bid to avenge the murder of his father by the brother who has assumed control of the Denmark Corporation.

Desperate measures also prompt teacher Steve Coogan to produce a sequel to the Bard's masterpiece in the hope of saving his job in Andrew Fleming's Hamlet 2 (2008). Arnold Schwarzenegger gets to lampoon the Dane in John McTiernan's Last Action Hero (1993), which contains two neat jokes, as Ian McKellen plays Death from Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and Joan Plowright cameos as a teacher showing a clip from the 1948 version of Hamlet, which had starred her late husband, Laurence Olivier.

The gags were more sophisticated in Tom Stoppard's take on his own hit play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), which also gave Disney the idea for the characters of Timon the meerkat and Pumbaa the warthog in Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff's The Lion King (1994), which sees Simba attempt to regain control of the Pride Lands after his father, Mufasa, is murdered by his uncle, Scar. Another re-imagining of Hamlet's history comes in Claire McCarthy's Ophelia (2018), which draws on a novel by Lisa Klein to depict events at Elsinore from the viewpoint of a motherless rebel (Daisy Ridley) entangled in a political powerplay.

No one repurposed Shakespeare with more ingenuity than Akira Kurosawa, whose version of Hamlet, The Bad Sleep Well (1960), forms part of a noir trilogy that also includes Stray Dog (1949) and High and Low (1963). The grieving son is played by Toshiro Mifune, who marries Kyoko Kagawa, the daughter of the president of the Public Corporation while investigating his father's supposed suicide. Mifune's marriage to Isuzu Yamada leads him further astray in Throne of Blood (1957), a variation on Macbeth staged in feudal times that is evocatively set in Cobweb Castle. When Kurosawa returned to the Bard towards the end of his career, he replaced brooding monochrome with shimmering colour in Ran (1985), which draws on King Lear for its story of Tatsuya Nakadai, a Sengoku-period warlord who divides his kingdom between his three sons.

The Scottish play was one of the first to be rejigged for modern movie audiences when Ken Hughes and co-writer Philip Yordan switched it to London gangland for Joe MacBeth (1955). Subsequently, this study in ambition, treachery and regret has inspired the Bollywood duo of Maqbool (2003) and Veeram (2014). Lear has most notably resurfaced in the form of Jocelyn Moorhouse's adaptation of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, A Thousand Acres (1997), with Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jennifer Jason Leigh playing the daughters of Iowa landowner, Jason Robards. But there is also much to admire in Kristian Levring's Dogme95 offering, The King Is Alive (2000), and Don Boyd's My Kingdom (2011), which respectively take the action to the Namibian desert and recessional Liverpool.

Kenneth Branagh once played Iago opposite Laurence Fishburne in Oliver Parker's Othello (1995), another storyline that has spawned its share of screen spin-offs, including Basil Dearden's jazz drama, All Night Long (1962), and Tim Blake Nelson's O (2001), which sees Mekhi Phifer, Julia Stiles and Josh Hartnett stepping into the roles of Othello, Desdemona and Iago. This is one of many Shakespearean plays to be reworked as a teenpic, with the other choice examples being Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991; the Henriad), Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You (1999; The Taming of the Shrew), Tommy O'Haver's Get Over It (2001; A Midsummer Night's Dream) and Andy Fickman's She's the Man (2006; Twelfth Night).

The star-crossed lovers of Verona have also inspired their share of refits, including Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins's multi-Oscar winner, West Side Story (1961), Andrzej Bartkowiak's Romeo Must Die (2000), which pitched Jet Li and Aaliyah into an Oakland turf war, and Johnathan Levine's Warm Bodies (2013), which transformed the duo into a zombie (Nicholas Hoult) and one of the last surviving humans (Teresa Palmer). And mention must also be made of Fred M. Wilcox's cult favourite, Forbidden Planet (1956), which sent The Tempest into outer space; Jim Abrahams's Big Business (1988), which cast Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin as two sets of identical twins in putting a corporate spin on The Comedy of Errors (which Kenneth Branagh would love to film); Caesar Must Die (2012), Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's prison-set rethink of Julius Caesar; and Shakirah Bourne's A Caribbean Dream (2017), which charmingly whisks A Midsummer Night's Dream off to modern-day Barbados.