Ethan Hawke plays Hamlet as a film student, Kyle MacLachlan co-stars as Uncle Claudius, with Diane Venora as Gertrude, Liev Schreiber as Laertes, Julia Stiles as Ophelia, Steve Zahn as Rosencrantz, Bill Murray as Polonius, and Sam Shepard as Hamlet's father.

The website's consensus reads: "Stiff performances fail to produce any tension onscreen.

"[2] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 70/100, based on 32 reviews from mainstream critics.

[3] Film critic Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times lauded it as a "vital and sharply intelligent film,"[4] while The Washington Post reviewer deemed it as a "darkly interesting distraction but not much more.

The Los Angeles Times described him as a "superb Prince of Denmark - youthful, sensitive, passionate but with a mature grasp of the workings of human nature.