INSPIRED BY THE BARD
Here’s an interesting bunch of films that are loosely (some of them tightly) based on Shakespeare’s plays.
Anyone who has the slightest interest in Shakespeare will be intrigued by Al Pacino’s Looking For Richard (1996). It features selected scenes from Richard III (played by Pacino), with Alec Baldwin, Winona Ryder, Aidan Quinn and Kevin Spacey. It also features these actors discussing their roles, background on the play itself, and some insightful points from scholars, as well as actors who have trod the boards in Shakespeare plays. 
Rosencranz And Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) is loosely based on the lives of two fairly minor characters in Hamlet. Unaware that their fates are sealed by their parts in the play, they blindly stumble around trying to deviate from those roles. Gary Oldman, Tim Roth and Richard Dreyfuss star in this comical absurdist film scripted by the talented Tom Stoppard. Though perhaps an acquired taste, this film rewards attentive viewers with solid entertainment.
For a hundred years after Shakespeare’s plays were written and first performed, women were by law banned from acting on stage. This meant that every part, male and female, was played by men. In Stage Beauty (2004), Billy Crudup is an actor famous for portraying women. Claire Danes wants to act, so gets started by playing a woman in a minor league play. This attracts so much attention that  King Charles II is persuaded to change the ban around 1650. How this is accomplished will not be revealed here.  
A Double Life (1947) is 70 years old, but holds up well. Ronald Coleman is a Shakespearean actor best known for his portrayal of Othello. He becomes more and more unable to separate his stage life from real life, with increasingly tragic results.  Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin penned this excellent screenplay, and they contend that actors getting too much into their characters is a fairly common problem. 
Leonard Bernstein traded warring families for warring New York gangs for the marvelous West Side Story (1961). It’s Romeo and Juliet with music and dancing, and its charm is still evident after more than 50 years. 
King Lear’s terrible daughters (well, two out of three) are the basis for several good films. Japanese master Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) is a colorful take. And A Thousand Acres (1997) is based on Jane Smiley’s novel of family troubles on an Iowa farm. 
Here are two movies based on The Tempest. 1948's Yellow Sky with Gregory Peck as an outlaw seems a bit of a stretch to me. But in1956 came Forbidden Planet with Walter Pigeon, Anne Francis and one of the first screen robots. This one is really close to the Shakespeare plot. 
The crown jewel of this group of films is the marvelous Shakespeare In Love (1998). It is an almost completely fictional account of the life of William Shakespeare at the time he was writing Romeo and Juliet. The Bard is played winningly by Ralph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow is his Juliet-like love interest. This movie won a truckload of Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Paltrow) and Best Supporting Actress (the iconic Judy Dench). It is also a barrel of fun!
All of the films in this column are available on DVD.