Julie Taymor's film version of Shakespeare's earliest and goriest tragedy is bloody entertaining. Anthony Hopkins is expert as ever as the stubborn Roman general Titus Andronicus, whose good intentions result in one bad decision after another. Jessica Lange is striking as Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and Harry Lennix is great as the Queen's chief advisor and enforcer, Aaron, a fascinatingly reflective evil Moor. Taymor's audacious stagecraft broadens the play's Roman setting to inhabit two thousand years of history, blending design elements from many different epochs, including Italy's 20th-century wrestle with fascism. Titus's visual inventiveness and strong performances energize the play's dour revenge machinations, which themselves hold their own with today's competitive connoisseurs of filmic violence--DePalma, Scorsese, and Tarantino would all no doubt love to stage a scene where the long-suffering tragic hero serves his nemesis a mincemeat pie made from the blood and pulverized bones of her thuggish children. Taymor's added prologue of a child playing with toy soldiers of all ages that segues into live soldiers in the Colosseum is a risky move that pays off, but the odd final flourish focusing on the orphaned child of Tamora and Aaron seems out of tune with the play's grim unwinding.