In Cradle Will Rock, we first see Welles onstage rehearsing Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's most Marlovian play, arrives onscreen as Titus, directed by Julie Taymor, and it probably won't change the mind of that work's many denigrators, such as Harold Bloom, who described it as "Stephen King turned loose among the Romans and the Goths." Actually, the way it's been done here, the play comes across as the granddaddy of all Hollywood ghoulfests. Anthony Hopkins as Titus wreaks his vengeance on Jessica Lange's Goth Queen Tamora by baking her two sons into a meat pie for her unwitting delectation, and, in general, there seems to be some kind of limb-hacking going on every other minute. Taymor probably chose to film this play, which she's also directed Off Broadway, because it gives her the opportunity to set in motion a flurry of tableaux vivants. The film is striking and original and, in its clash of the brutal and the delicately poetic, supremely offputting.

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