A Midsummer Night’s Dream

(USA, comedy-fantasy, 104 min., unrated) Shakespeare’s love-crossed charmer gets transplanted to modern Hollywood. “Reportedly the Bard’s most-produced play and translated to the screen many times, A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes perfect sense as a Hollywood-set story, with its mix of high and low, worldly and magical, and the play within the play. Transposing the Athenian comedy to Southern California, Casey Wilder Mott takes his bow as a feature director with a sensuous, silly and superbly cast version, one whose visually vibrancy matches its feel for the language. Abridged and spiked with nods to other works by Shakespeare, his Dream will enchant everyone except the most inflexible purists, and will likely turn on the uninitiated to the charms of the Elizabethan playwright. ” – Hollywood Reporter