This is it. It’s only a half hour long but really good.
Oh, and for regular adaptations.
I think thatPolanski’s version of MacBethget’s the spirit of the play exactly right. Not everyone loves it, but it’s the only straight adaptation (read: not Throne of Blood) that really gets it.
I like the Julius Cesar that has Brando in it. Not everyone feels the way that I do, but it’s simple and the clean. Gives you a very good feel for the play.
I also want to get a non Kurosawa version of King Lear in here because it is absolutely my favorite and there aren’t many good film versions. I like Peter Brook’s version.
My second favorite play is Henry IV part 1 (part 2 is ok) and there are just *no *good film versions. Which is a shame. Chimes at Midnight is close, but sort of a mess and not really Henry IV.
I haven’t seen The Hollow Crown series, which does Henry IV, so that might be pretty good. They do a version of Richard II also, which no one does and I have been meaning to see, because I haven’t seen any good productions of that play ever. I trust the people who made it, but won’t recommend it without actually having watched it. Proceed with caution.
Not Nazi Germany, contemporary Balkans. It’s definitely worth watching, although it plays fast and loose with the text.
The recent BBC version of King Lear with Ian McKellen is excellent, as is the David Tennant Hamlet that Stranger on a Train mentioned.
Also, the Globe and the RSC have been pretty good about making many of their recent productions available on DVD / streaming video; it’s obviously not the same as watching the show in the theater, but it captures some of the interplay with the audience, and I think the comedies, in particular, just work so much better on stage that it’s worth tracking them down.
I second this recommendation. The cast is excellent and so is everything else. It is can be very difficult to watch in some places, but that just makes the revenge all the sweeter. I also love the way Harry Lennix’s Aaron delivered the “Villain, I have done thy mother” line. 
I second the recommendation of the 1953 Julius Caesar. John Gielgud and James Mason are amazing (of course) and it’s great fun to see American movie stars take on the other roles. Rascally Louis Calhern as Caesar! Dumpy ol’ Edmund O’Brien as Casca! Alan Napier – Batman’s Butler! – as Cicero!
See, I can’t really recommend her film versions of the plays Titus is okay I guess. It’s not a very good play to start with, but I really think her film of the Tempest is disjointed. My problem with Taymor is, while I think she is a genius designer she is a mediocre story teller. I find her movies meandering and overly in love with her own style.
Napier was a popular character actor well before he took up the mantle of Alfred. As for the movie, Brando takes me out of it every time. Not a big fan.
Yeah, but I double-dog dare anyone to catch him in a movie and not go “Alfred!!!” It’s like the William Tell Overture and the Lone Ranger.
Brando IS a pretty terrible Marc Antony. But you’re too busy pointing and laughing at his miniskirt to really notice.
I highly recommend the Patrick Stewart/Kate Fleetwood performance of Macbeth. It’s a chiller. The only problem I had: accepting Jean-Luc Picard as a multiple murderer. If you can get past that, it’s wonderful.
This version is even more impressive considering that it’s basically a bunch of rich people screwing around and going, “hey gang, let’s make a movie!”
Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet, set in modern-day Florida, is pretty good, though some of the speeches are moved around.
I third the recommendation of Titus. It’s bloody and frightening, and excellent.
Making a list… and making popcorn…
Or Carroll O’Connor in Cleopatra: “Hey! It’s Archie Bunker!” 
Side bar question: are these modern performances that were shown on the BBC or PBS available on any of the popular streaming services? I’m noticing several recommended that were made after 2006 that I never saw.
True. They did it in a week and a half, and didn’t tell anyone outside about it until shooting was done.
The Russian version of Hamlet was translated by Boris Pasternak. The film version (1964) was directed by Grigory Kozintsev and has a score by Dmitri Shostakovich. The actor who plays Hamlet, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, is brilliant in the role. Olivier loved his peformance.
Incidentally, Smotunkovsky’s other roles included Porfiry Petrovitch, the detective in Dostoyevskii’s Crime and Punishment (in which he was also brilliant), and he starred in a very popular Soviet comedy Watch Out for Automobiles! where he played a car thief who had the title role in an amateur production of Hamlet.
You should be able to find subtitled videos of all of the above.
EDIT: Come to think of it, Pasternak translated Romeo and Juliet into Russian as well. I’ve seen it, and its brilliant too.
Has anyone seen John Cleese in the BBC production of Taming of the Shrew (1980)?
Browsing the Wiki page for the play on film, I see that there was also a 1929 version with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, along with 1953’s Kiss Me, Kate (Cole Porter’s adaptation), et cetera, et cetera.
Laurence Olivier did films of Henry V, Richard III, and Othello.
Henry V was shot on a shoestring budget in the middle of World War II. The background scenery is often matte paintings (sometimes even cloth stage backdrops), but with a little “willing suspension of disbelief”, it works pretty well. Branagh is better at the intimate, personal moments, but Olivier is better at the grand speeches.
Olivier’s Richard III is awesomely wicked.
Othello:
The one with Laurence Fishburn as Othello and Kenneth Branagh as Iago is not bad.
The one with Orson Wells is not bad.
I have not yet seen Laurence Olivier’s version, but I intend to.
Julius Caesar
1953 James Mason as Brutus, Marlon Brando as Antony. I liked it.
1970 Jason Robards as Brutus, Charlton Heston as Antony. Not as good as the 1953 version, but I liked it.
Twelfth Night
I liked it.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Old-fashioned acting styles may not appeal to modern viewers, but I enjoyed it. It is in black-and-white, but it is still visually spectacular. Watch it on the biggest screen you can.
Very low budget, but not bad. Judi Dench’s costume consisted of green paint and a few strategically placed fig leaves, which prompted Evil Captor to start a thread titled “Nice rack, M!”
I was not that fond of Pfeiffer and Kline, but the rest of the cast is superb.
The film was shot in Mexico–Mexico City & Veracruz. Signs were in English, but it was definitely set in “Fair Verona” with a few scenes shot out of town. A fantasy place, like Elizabethan England’s Romantic Italy.
I saw it during a Los Angeles visit–just after release. And remember a scene near the end, where Romeo fights Paris at Juliet’s tomb & kills him. This has disappeared from the film–but Shakespeare wrote it. Perhaps early audience surveys indicated dismay that Leonardo killed cutie Paul Rudd? (Who is still a cutie, by the way.)
Yes, the brash Australian may have made some edits (doesn’t almost every production of Shakespeare?). Better than Julian Fellowes’ version, shot in Verona in lovely period style. But totally re-written by Lord Fellowes:
Neither i nor that crowd in LA have been to Cambridge. But they were raptly silent throughout the film & applauded wildly at the end. I think* they* got it…