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100Sensitive and vivid response to the tangled issues of teen violence, race and self-esteem.
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88A sign of O's effectiveness is that it works regardless of whether you know Shakespeare's play.
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88Exceptionally intelligent and powerful contemporary adaptation.
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83To an astonishing degree, O gets the tragic Shakespeare mood, that somber stentorian passion born of hidden slivers of ambition and betrayal.
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75A good film for most of the way, and then a powerful film at the end, when, in the traditional Shakespearean manner, all of the plot threads come together, the victims are killed, the survivors mourn, and life goes on.
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75This is a serious and well-acted drama, not a jokey ripoff, whose relevance (however distant) to Columbine is a plus.
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75O has one advantage over "Othello" -- since it's a new movie, not a classic, it has the power to surprise.
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75Artful and emotionally compelling.
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75The filmmakers have a vision of the way Shakespeare can be made vibrant and vital to modern viewers, with or without the lofty original dialogue.
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70Essential to the success it manages is Hartnett's low-key, charismatic performance -- cool, withholding, compelling. The triumph of his insinuating Hugo/Iago is how plausible he is, how he manages to convincingly inject poison in so many minds without seeming to be trying.
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63What O lacks is a sense of spontaneity: Despite its contemporary dialogue and manner, the movie can't overcome a nagging aura of artifice.
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63Stripped of its poetry, some of the devices of the tragedy of the Moor come off here as woefully contrived.
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63The film collapses under the weight of the effort to shoehorn Shakespeare's story into a context that ultimately doesn't accommodate it.
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60Too much of a locker-room melodrama to make for great tragedy.
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60Every character fated to die in Othello meets his or her maker by the time the curtain falls on Blake's adaptation, which means the manicured campus of Palmetto Grove is left littered with slain coeds.
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50This turgid melodrama fast-breaks away from the heart of its own subject.
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50A fairly ordinary drama about young love, basketball, petty jealousy and high school politics. The movie also has one of the goofiest, over-the-top finales in recent memory.
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50Everything has been modernized except for the characters, and that's this movie's tragic flaw.
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50The film generally looks like a TV special, with low production values and lots of closeups.
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40Had Nelson and Kaaya been less concerned with following Othello to the letter and rather had pursued this love affair into uncharted cinematic waters, O might have been more than an unresolved mixture of gimmickry and good intentions.
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40In trying to make "Othello" more lifelike and bring it down to a younger audience -- in effect, to make it more democratic -- the adaptation has rendered the material artless.
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40The actors attack their roles with commitment (Hartnett’s understatement is impressive), but their fervor can’t hide the movie’s implausible, often confusing storytelling.
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40On your already groaning Shakespeare for Teens video shelf, stack this one above "10 Things I Hate About You" (a.k.a. "The Taming of the Shrew") and quite a bit below "Romeo + Juliet."
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30The film is a plodding, earnest adaptation that strips the source of its richness and ambiguity.
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30It's a doomy dirge of a movie, in which the protagonists, or at least the actors who play them, aren't equipped to handle their outsize passions.
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20The makers of this malnourished teen drama haven't just dropped six letters from the title of Shakespeare's Othello, they have excised everything that gives the original its troubling power -- principally a point but also furious passion.
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