11th century Scotland. The country is torn apart by a bloody civil war. Army chief Macbeth has just won a decisive battle when he meets three witches who predict that he will become king. Bewitched by prophecy and the ambition of his wife, he murders the king to seize the throne. From then on he is desperate to keep his position, even if it means losing his mind and sliding towards his inevitable fall.

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This flamboyant adaptation of Shakespeare's classic starring Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender is stunningly beautiful. Rife with slow-motion, hallucinatory landscapes, a nightmarish haze and delirious lighting, it is a great sensory experience that transforms Shakespeare’s play into a fantastic odyssey. Director Justin Kurzel (The Snowtown Murders) is currently wrapping a Hollywood adaptation of the video game Assassin's Creed, also starring Fassbender and Cotillard, which offers a hint of his career’s coming trajectory. Because despite being a visual feast (cinematographer Adam Arkapaw worked on the TV series True Detective), the movie’s story and characters remain frozen within staging that is too rigid. The result leaves the unpleasant impression of failure – that Macbeth and could have been a great movie instead of a beautiful piece of superficiality.