Love's Labour's Lost (Vol. 77) | Richard Corliss (review date 12 June 2000)

Richard Corliss (review date 12 June 2000)

SOURCE: Corliss, Richard. “Branagh Faces the Music.” Time 155, no. 24 (12 June 2000): 82.

[In the following review of Kenneth Branagh's film version of Love's Labour's Lost, Corliss accuses the director and star of amateurism and lists several weaknesses of the project.]

We come to bury Branagh, not to praise him. Sorry, wrong play and all, but as Kenneth Branagh turns 40 this year—and as he presents Love's Labour's Lost, his fourth Shakespeare film as star and director—it's time to wonder what happened to this Great Hope of the British Theatre, this jack-of-all-arts, this next Olivier. By his mid-20s Branagh had earned raves as Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Company, staged and fronted an acclaimed Romeo and Juliet and starred in the miniseries Fortunes of War with his future wife Emma Thompson. It all seems so very long ago when a new Branagh project was an...

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