Sensitive and vivid response to the tangled issues of teen violence, race and self-esteem.

A sign of O's effectiveness is that it works regardless of whether you know Shakespeare's play.

Exceptionally intelligent and powerful contemporary adaptation.

To an astonishing degree, O gets the tragic Shakespeare mood, that somber stentorian passion born of hidden slivers of ambition and betrayal.

This is a serious and well-acted drama, not a jokey ripoff, whose relevance (however distant) to Columbine is a plus.

A good film for most of the way, and then a powerful film at the end, when, in the traditional Shakespearean manner, all of the plot threads come together, the victims are killed, the survivors mourn, and life goes on.

Artful and emotionally compelling.

O has one advantage over "Othello" -- since it's a new movie, not a classic, it has the power to surprise.

The filmmakers have a vision of the way Shakespeare can be made vibrant and vital to modern viewers, with or without the lofty original dialogue.

Essential to the success it manages is Hartnett's low-key, charismatic performance -- cool, withholding, compelling. The triumph of his insinuating Hugo/Iago is how plausible he is, how he manages to convincingly inject poison in so many minds without seeming to be trying.

Stripped of its poetry, some of the devices of the tragedy of the Moor come off here as woefully contrived.

What O lacks is a sense of spontaneity: Despite its contemporary dialogue and manner, the movie can't overcome a nagging aura of artifice.

The film collapses under the weight of the effort to shoehorn Shakespeare's story into a context that ultimately doesn't accommodate it.

Every character fated to die in Othello meets his or her maker by the time the curtain falls on Blake's adaptation, which means the manicured campus of Palmetto Grove is left littered with slain coeds.