Shakespeare on Film
This is a list of feature-length films of Shakespeare's works. It's therefore a bit selective: I've picked films which I might possibly want use in my courses on Shakespeare, grad and undergrad, as examples of performance. It does not include teaching aids, or films of actors' studios, or other pedagogical films. I also don't include films of operatic versions or ballets (such as Falstaff and Otello) though films are out there for these. Not all of the films are precise records of the plays--some are or contain only allusions. Nor does it account for taste! For suggestions, please from here or my homepage.
Where can you find them? One source is the Internet Movie Database; if you search for "Shakespeare" at the IMDb you will find a variety of other Shakespeare references as well. Wikipedia also has a relevant entry. One non-commercial list is Shakespeare on Film and Television from the Library of Congress, a great listing of many rare productions, including U.S. and British TV productions. For more recent films, the Movie Review Query Engine is a great search engine for finding multiple reviews at once from all sorts of print sources. A book which will no doubt help is Eddie Sammons, Shakespeare: A Hundred Years on Film.
Where can you buy them? Look at video stores such as Blockbuster, Amazon.com, and Amazon.com.uk. Films.com has a listing of films for teaching the humanities; it also has a number of shorter films (20 to 40 minutes in length) on Shakespeare's life, language, plays, and culture. Bullfrog films and Kultur films have some. One good site for some hard-to-find foreign releases (that is, non-north American releases, though some are of north American films) is Lear Media. 
Another great site with a lot of films, including many adaptations, is Bardcentral. I don't know how to obtain copes aside from referring to these sites.
I include the BBC series of Shakespeare's works as noted; the date I have assumed for all of these is 1980, though they were produced between 1978 and 1985. These are available from Ambrose Video and Documentary Video (on DVD and on videotape); some are now available from Amazon.com in a series of comedies, a series of histories, a series of tragedies, and another series of tragedies. Three are available from the Globe bookshop. These are generally very good, and some of the films of the less well-known works seem to be the only filmed versions. Some of are also my favorites: Petruchio in the BBC version of The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, is performed by John Cleese; Helen Mirren is a wonderful Rosalind in As You Like It; and Roger Daltrey, believe it or not, stars in The Comedy of Errors. The only play which this series apparently did not produce is The Two Noble Kinsmen (the one play I know of no film for at all). There are also 9 films which make up the series "The Plays of William Shakespeare," though note that some of these have not been well reviewed. A wise customer always reads reviews before investing.
