AllMovie

King Lear is a 1999 adaptation of William Shakespeare's play of the same name. The film stars Brian Blessed in the title role. Apart from Peter Brook's King Lear in 1971, it is the only other feature-length film adaptation to preserve Shakespeare's verse. Yvonne Griggs, in Shakespeare's King Lear: A close study of the relationship between text and film (2009), characterised it as "a very stilted costume drama".