Olive Parker's 'Othello' is a beautifully filmed movie based on the play by William Shakespeare. Parker manages to capture the passion and love between Othello and Desdemona and even plays it up, making the betrayal and tragedy more powerful. Various methods, such as camera angles and focuses, background music, setting, and actors' interpretations all contribute to the mood, feeling and understanding of the movie.
             To keep Othello at a reasonable two hours, Oliver Parker has only used around half of Shakespeare's original text in the screenplay. Yet, the movie still runs smoothly and remains faithful to the play's central themes and conflicts. It still gives a full sense of time and events by using some dialogue as voice-overs between scenes and montage sequences to explain what is not shown on screen.
             A gifted general, the Moor Othello (Laurence Fisburn), is commissioned to fight the Turkish army at Cyprus. He has just promoted Cassio (Nathaniel Parker) to lieutenant and Iago (Kenneth Branagh) is furious. Iago soon makes plans to cause Othello's downfall and shatter the relationship between the Moor and his wife, Desdemona (Irene Jacob). 'For sheer impact, this Othello can stand side-by-side with the versions brought to the screen by Orson Welles (as restored in 1992) and Lawrence Olivier.'
             In this version, Parker has chosen to focus on the character's sexuality. Laurence Fishburne is well cast as the smouldering Moor and Irene Jacob plays Desdemona ever so sweet and seductively. Though he may not read the lines as well as his predecessors, Fishburne's visual presence on the screen is stunning. Exactly as Parker intended, his Othello is heightened so that he is at least cinematically equal to Branagh's Iago. Branagh is a master of Shakespeare, having previously directed 'Henry V' and 'Much ado about Nothing'. In the movie, he plays Iago convincingly and cunningly. In a sense Iago can be seen as the main character as it is he
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