Another year, another interpretation of Macbeth.

Macbeth (2015) stars Michael Fassbinder in the title role & Marion Cotillard as the guilty queen, and is directed by Justin Kurzel (The Snowtown Murders), has some furious bristling cinematography and looks sooty, alien and completely heavy-metal. Cannot wait.
Macbeth more than any other of Shakespeare's story draws a darker interpretation. It's almost a naturalistic look at evil and has offered clay for some of the greatest film-makers that have ever lived. The ending is deeply nihilistic resetting of the order of the universe, a catharsis created from blood, destruction and murder.

Macbeth is a bad human being trying to convince himself he is a good man, bound by filiality and loyalty, until he finally relents, and then furiously rushes to his inevitable and pointless end. Macbeth death scenes in film always have a very detached, ironic feel. Everybody, the creators of the film, the play-wright, even Macbeth are more or less just bystanders to his end. The Birnam Woods have been uprooted, MacDuff was medieval C-section baby, and the prophecy has come true, (or was always true, maybe the witches were just giving a prognosis about the future, something that Maqbool does with it "witches" more on that in a minute). So all that's left is to cut off Macbeth's head and take the crown to the next king, the universe shrugs.

Throne of Blood had a perfect beginning and end to this tale, as the world of the story arrives from a timeless fog and is then is swallowed back again inside it at the end. The universe hates you or is indifferent to you, and your good and bad acts don't matter in the least. Throne of Blood also ends with the most amazing sequence action sequence ever put on film, which I will put against an asshole indifferent universe anyday, so at least we have that going for us.

Roman Polanski's  Macbeth (1971) casts the witches as pagan and kind of ragged horror movie creatures. Here is the opening of that film, which anybody would have a hard time forgetting:

How do you top that? By casting Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri as the witches in Maqbool.

I was a teenager when Maqbool came out. I hadn't seen Naseeruddin Shah in Sparsh or Om Puri in Ardh Satya or Pankaj Kapur in Ek Doctor ki Maut and all of them in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, and it is amazing to see these legends indulge themselves onscreen. Vishal Bharadwaj used the length and tone changes that a Hindi film allows to concentrate on other characters, letting them more or less dominate the early parts of the film.