A Midsummer Night's Dream is a 1999 fantasy romantic comedy film written, produced, and directed by Michael Hoffman, based on the 1600 play of the same name by William Shakespeare.

The ensemble cast features Kevin Kline as Bottom, Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Everett as Titania and Oberon, Stanley Tucci as Puck, and Calista Flockhart, Anna Friel, Christian Bale, and Dominic West as the four lovers.

In 1890s Monte Athena, in the Kingdom of Italy, as Duke Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding banquet preparations are underway, young Hermia's father Egeus approaches him.

The film made use of Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for an 1843 stage production (including the famous Wedding March), alongside operatic works from Giuseppe Verdi, Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini, Gioacchino Rossini and Pietro Mascagni.

In The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote: Michael Hoffman's fussy production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is just such a parade of incongruities, with performances ranging from the sublime to the you-know-what ... Not even Michelle Pfeiffer's commanding loveliness as the fairy queen Titania, and her ability to speak of such things as 'my bower' with perfect ease, can offset the decision to have the actors grapple awkwardly with bicycles ...

The distraught Helena, played as a hand-waving, eye-rolling ditz by Calista Flockhart, hardly fits into the same film with David Strathairn's reserved Duke Theseus, or with Rupert Everett as a slinky Oberon.

Staging a play about Pyramus and Thisbe with a troupe including Bill Irwin, Roger Rees and Sam Rockwell (as the beauteous heroine), Bottom's acting company delights its late-19th-century audience in ways Hoffman's film can only occasionally manage.

In a completely unexpected turn, Rockwell moves the sceptical and bemused audience to tears as he performs Thisbe's scene reacting to the death of Pyramus, proving that he alone among the band of actors has any real talent for the craft.

[10]In the San Francisco Chronicle, Peter Stack wrote: Purists will quibble, but William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is a playful, sexy piece of work - just what the Bard might have conjured up for a movie adaptation of his beloved spring-fever comedy.

In his glorious way of overdoing it - turning the very notion of acting into farce - he embodies a supreme comic madness that is audacious yet embracing ... Michelle Pfeiffer plays it regal, pouty and come-hither as Titania.

Her seduction of Bottom, turned to an ass under the spell of Puck (Stanley Tucci with horns and impish grin), is riotous ... A real surprise is the sly comic depth of Calista Flockhart's bicycle-riding Helena, miles from Ally McBeal ... Rupert Everett is imperious as Oberon, the jealous fairy king, and Tucci's Puck is amusingly tweaky as he keeps messing up his missions to drop magic nectar into lovers' eyes.

[11]In Time Out New York, Andrew Johnston wrote: A strangely uneven adaptation of the Bard's most famous comedy, Michael Hoffman's Dream is, if nothing else, admirable for its lack of a contrived gimmick.

The film soars when actors who remember that Shakespeare was primarily an entertainer carry the ball, but things get pretty turgid when the focus is on those who seem cowed by appearing in an adaptation of a Major Literary Classic.

[12]In The Washington Post, Jane Horwitz wrote: Instead of Shakespeare's Athens, Hoffman dreams his Dream in a gorgeous Tuscan hill town at the turn of the century, with production designer Luciana Arrighi and costume designer Gabriella Pescucci creating a luscious milieu of dusty green shutters, olive groves and vineyards reminiscent of the 1986 Merchant-Ivory gem A Room With a View ... some in the cast negotiate Shakespeare's lines better than others.

[13]Also in The Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote: After watching William Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream, Michael Hoffman's adaptation of the romantic comedy, I'm left with more admiration than fairy dust.