What sparks creativity? Best May movies tackle the Bard and folk music.
Critic Peter Rainer’s top picks for May include films that take viewers inside the creative process of folk musicians, an environmental artist, and Shakespeare.
‘All Is True’ ponders why Shakespeare put down his quill
Has there ever been so much speculation about a life so little known as William Shakespeare’s? The latest entry in the post-“Shakespeare in Love” sweepstakes is the engrossing, uneven “All Is True.” Directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh as the Bard, it picks up at the end of Shakespeare’s life, when, in 1613, he left London following a catastrophic fire at the Globe Theatre and returned to his family in Stratford-upon-Avon, never to write again.
Why did he stop? This is the film’s central conceit, and Ben Elton, who wrote the screenplay, is at no loss for answers. It may seem presumptuous to, in effect, psychoanalyze a writer who, perhaps more than any other, plumbed the depths of the human psyche. Still, Branagh and Elton
