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Video Reviews : ****Excellent***Good**Fair*Poor : <i> Recent releases, reviewed by Times critics.</i> : Movies

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<i> Compiled by Terry Atkinson</i>

**** “Hamlet.” Paramount. $19.95.

Laurence Olivier’s magnificent performance as Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane--a heavily Freudian interpretation which affected most subsequent stage and screen Hamlets--is no surprise here. Neither is the high level of acting he elicits from the rest of the cast--which includes Stanley Holloway as a Cockney First Gravedigger and teen-ager Jean Simmons as Ophelia. But his work here as a movie director is. Olivier has a highly mobile, tense, Gothic visual style, suggesting a mingling of Welles and Wyler. Dramatically, this is the definitive screen Hamlet and, cinematically, it’s one of the most fluid and ingenious.

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