Coriolanus

A decade after tackling the character onstage, Ralph Fiennes reprises a juicy Shakespearean role in his bloody, bellicose directorial debut, "Coriolanus," ambitiously updating the late-career tragedy to "a place calling itself Rome" (actually present-day Belgrade, Serbia) in a move that places this among the Bard's more macho adaptations. Drastically cutting back Shakespeare's second-longest play from its original form without sacrificing the flavor of the original language, Fiennes and screenwriter John Logan emerge with a reasonably commercial war movie that is most effective in its least talky stretches, but somewhat difficult to follow in the finer points of its political intrigue. Official Selections 2011BERic, 2011TOR. RATING ***