Romeo and Juliet on screen

"[3] He went to great lengths to establish authenticity and the film's intellectual credentials: researchers were sent to Verona to take photographs for the designers; the paintings of Botticelli, Bellini, Carpaccio and Gozzoli were studied to provide visual inspiration; and two academic advisers (John Tucker Murray of Harvard and William Strunk, Jr. of Cornell) were flown to the set, with instructions to criticise the production freely.

[4] Scholar Stephen Orgel describes Cukor's film as "largely miscast ... with a preposterously mature pair of lovers in Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer, and an elderly John Barrymore as a stagey Mercutio decades out of date.

[14] A number of scenes are expanded as opportunities for visual spectacle, including the opening brawl (set against the backdrop of a religious procession), the wedding and Juliet's funeral.

[11][16] Clusters of images are used to define the central characters: Romeo is first sighted leaning against a ruined building in an arcadian scene, complete with a pipe-playing shepherd and his sheepdog; the livelier Juliet is associated with Capulet's formal garden, with its decorative fish pond.

"[19] Stephen Orgel describes Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet as being "full of beautiful young people, and the camera, and the lush Technicolor, make the most of their sexual energy and good looks.

[22]In truth, Zeffirelli's young leads were already experienced actors: Leonard Whiting (then sixteen) had been the youngest member of the National Theatre and had played The Artful Dodger in Oliver!

Olivia Hussey (aged fifteen) had studied for four years at the Italia Conti Drama School and had starred opposite Vanessa Redgrave in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in the West End.

The way in which Mercutio physically collapses onto Romeo after the Queen Mab speech, and again when mortally wounded, has been credited with introducing homosexual overtones into the public perception of their relationship.

Taking his cue from Benvolio's speech ending "For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring"[27] Zeffirelli depicts the dry, oppressive heat of the little town where (in Anthony West's words) "men seek to kill each other to relieve their exasperation at having nothing better to do".

Critic Robert Hatch described Tybalt and Mercutio as "a couple of neighborhood warlords, vaunting their courage with grandstand high jinks, trying for a victory by humiliation, and giving no strong impression of a taste to kill.

"[29] The scene increases sympathy for Michael York's Tybalt (often played as a bloodthirsty bully on the stage) by making him shocked and guilty at the lethal wound he has inflicted.

[32] A particular difficulty for any screenwriter arises towards the end of the fourth act, where Shakespeare's play requires considerable compression to be effective on the big screen, without giving the impression of "cutting to the chase".

[33] In Zeffirelli's version, Juliet's return home from the Friar's cell, her submission to her father and the preparation for the wedding are drastically abbreviated, and the tomb scene is also cut short: Paris does not appear at all, and Benvolio (in the Balthazar role) is sent away but is not threatened.

[36] Nino Rota's Love Theme from the film, with the original lyrics (which had been drawn from several Shakespeare plays) replaced to become the song "A Time For Us", became a modest international chart hit.

[37] Australian director Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet and its accompanying soundtrack successfully targeted the "MTV Generation": a young audience of similar age to the story's characters.

[45] Paul Sorvino and Diane Venora play the Capulets as a boozy gangland patriarch and a miserable southern belle, unhappily married and frequently abusive to each other.

[48] As Peter Travers commented in Rolling Stone, the intention was to "make Romeo and Juliet accessible to the elusive Gen-X audience without leaving the play bowdlerised and broken".

[49] Some aspects of the modernisation have been praised as effective (a newscaster speaking the prologue, for example, or the replacement of Friar John with a courier message which gets misdelivered); others have been criticised as ridiculous: including a police chief banishing Romeo for a street killing rather than ordering his arrest.

[43] Mixed reviews greeted the endeavor, including Luhrmann's decision to delete the reconciliation of the feuding families, thus undermining the play's original ending and its lesson concerning the price of peace.

Some of Castellani's changes have been criticised as ineffective: interpolated dialogue is often banal, and the Prince's appearances are reimagined as formal hearings: undermining the spontaneity of Benvolio's defence of Romeo's behaviour in the duel scene.

[61] Castellani uses competing visual images in relation to the central characters: ominous grilles (and their shadows) contrasted with frequent optimistic shots of blue sky.

Laurence Harvey, as Romeo, was already an experienced screen actor, who would shortly take over roles intended for the late James Dean in Walk on the Wild Side and Summer and Smoke.

[64] By contrast, Susan Shentall, as Juliet, was a secretarial student who was discovered by the director in a London pub, and was cast for her "pale sweet skin and honey-blonde hair".

[75] Unlike Shakespeare who included relationships between his young lovers and the older generation (the parents, and parent-substitutes such as the Nurse and Friar Laurence) West Side Story keeps its focus firmly on the youth, with only peripheral roles for Doc, the soda-shop owner, and police officers Schrank and Krupke.

[74] In 1987 Abel Ferrara directed a take on the classic tale of Romeo and Juliet in China Girl, an independent neo-noir romantic thriller film.

[77] In 1996, Troma Studios and director Lloyd Kaufman filmed Tromeo and Juliet, a transgressive "trash/punk" adaptation of the play, set in present-day Manhattan and featuring Lemmy (of Motörhead) as its chorus.

[83] The central characters (Fenson Pierre Png and Audrey Lum May Yee) are cast as Romeo and Juliet in a production of Shakespeare's play, staged in a car park, which their families manage to ruin through their rivalry.

In it, Juliet's family were rulers of a floating island nation called Neo Verona before being killed by the Montagues, forcing her to hide in a theater troupe owned by a fictional version of William Shakespeare.

[93] The play was also adapted into an experimental independent film, R#J, which presented the story through text messages, photos and videos on mobile phones and social media posts.

Writers Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard exploited another commonplace of Shakespeare-related films, which scholar Tony Howard describes as the "playing Shakespeare is a gateway to self-fulfilment" plot.