Synopsis
King Lear (2018) is the BBC television film of Shakespeare you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Richard Eyre. The play is dragged into a bleak modern Britain of concrete bunkers, military fatigues and surveillance feeds.
Anthony Hopkins plays the ageing ruler who decides to carve up his kingdom among three daughters according to who flatters him best. Cordelia won't perform her love and is cast out; the scheming Goneril and Regan — Emma Thompson and Emily Watson — seize the crown and shut their father out in the storm. Madness, blindness and reckoning follow. Jim Broadbent, Andrew Scott and a young Florence Pugh round out the court.
Eyre trims the running time to two hours while keeping the verse intact, paring the tragedy down to a family tearing itself apart over one old man's vanity. Hopkins, nearing eighty, throws everything he has at the part. Stream King Lear online on iFILM.
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