Whether you take [Olivier's] central performance on its own terms (as a 'definitive' reading of the part) or as high camp, it's undoubtedly interesting as a phenomenon.
Richard III
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
United Kingdom · 1955
2h 35m
Director Laurence Olivier
Starring Cedric Hardwicke, Nicholas Hannen, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson
Genre Drama, History
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Though having received less contemporaneous praise than his other Shakespeare films, Laurence Olivier’s Richard III is now understood to be one of the defining adaptations put to film. Employing Technicolor and VistaVision in conjunction with added fourth wall breaks, the film embraced new visual and narrative tools to bring the classic play’s jealousy, deceit, and fratricide to new heights.
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What are critics saying?
Donning a doozy of a puttied schnoz, a slightly exaggerated limp, and a boyish, midnight-black wig, Sir Laurence Olivier feels more at home in the eponymous role of his own adaptation of Richard III than he does in any of his other storied roles, holding and releasing the succulent prose with unerring confidence and clarity.
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
As director and star, Olivier succeeds with the soliloquies as neither he nor anyone else ever did on film before; they're intimate, yet brazen.
Laurence Olivier gives the textbook course on Shakespearean villainy as crown-stealing schemer Richard. Considered by many to be Olivier's best take on the Bard. [22 Feb 2004]
The New York Times by Vincent Canby
Of all Olivier's Shakespearean films, Richard III is, to my way of thinking, the most satisfying, the most surprising and - it has to be said - the funniest. [24 Apr 1981, p.C6]
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