A friend, with a lot more culture than your columnist, used to carry audio recordings of two works on her iPhone; Proust’s Recherche du Temps Perdu in its entirety read by the members of the Comédie-Française and The Three Musketeers. Well, no one has ever got very far with filming Proust – despite the very impressive screenplay Harold Pinter wrote for Joseph Losey and Raúl Ruiz’s pretty masterly version of the last volume, Le Temps retrouvé, which includes not only Catherine Deneuve as Odette but the great John Malkovich as that very grand but also unreachably French figure the Baron de Charlus.

But if Proust is too much for adaptation, with The Three Musketeers they never stop. Baby boomers not only had the choice of the Classics Illustrated comic but a film re-telling of the old movie with Gene Kelly as D’Artagnan, Van Heflin as Athos and Lana Turner no less as Milady. Someone reminded me recently that my favourite film of The Three Musketeers is the Dick Lester one with Michael York as the Gascon swordsman and a cast that includes Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay and Faye Dunaway as Milady and which has the grandest and most sinister of Richelieus in Charlton Heston. Back in 1975 in Los Angeles, Heston did a Macbeth with Vanessa Redgrave which would have allowed the heroism and the villainy to simmer and blend.

Now we have a new French film of The Three Musketeers with Eva Green – Daniel Craig’s first Bond girl – in the role of Milady. You may recall that Milady meets a very grim fate at the end of the first Musketeers book so it’s intriguing to hear the new film is in two parts and Eva Green goes tearing around on horseback and taking it up to the boys in her mastery of the sword fighting.

It’s worth remembering that Dumas is one of the greatest trashmeisters who ever lived and old translations are swift and fine so you can read an old Collins classic hardback from some dusty bit of grandpa’s library.

But if you want a hero who is a meditative murderer, seeing daggers and saying his mind is full of scorpions, it’s hard to go past the play actors still refer to superstitiously as the Scottish tragedy and who better in prospect than that budding knight of the theatre, that killer of a thane, Ralph Fiennes, the man we’ve seen in The Grand Budapest Hotel and in a range of Shakespeare from Coriolanus to Cleopatra’s Antony and Richard III. Fiennes on a good day – and they stretch back to Schindler’s List and Prime Suspect – is a great actor. It is, however, a bit of a pity that Simon Godwin’s production is projected in that variety of speech the British call ‘street’ and which reeks of class in the self-conscious attempt to avoid it. Nor does it altogether help that the film transcription is not only raucous but ‘big’. In fact, though, this is least true of Fiennes himself and his Lady Macbeth Indira Varma. They both speak emphatically, sometimes wanderingly, but always with some sense of how the blank verse is calling the dark tune of obsessive assassination and the weird regicide by a man who is at some level of tainted and Machiavellian amorality born to be king.

Fiennes actually gives a performance that is easier to listen to than it is to watch. His balding shorn-back hair and his often wanly smiling self-deprecation can impede what is a pretty richly orchestrated performance which does at an aural level create a sense – uncanny and formidable as far as it goes – that this particular butcher of a man is actually improvising the confrontation with darkness and atrocity that defines him. This is, as you would expect, a performance shrouded in greatness even though the visual tattiness of the production as a whole works to obscure it.

Varma is also impressive even though it’s a relief when she dons a crown and green gown and looks a bit less like a sharp featured housewife who is angular, bitter and up for anything. Her fear, though, when she realises nothing will stop Macbeth, has a real shiver of terror.

Unless amnesia struck, this production cuts the Porter scene which is a pity given that it’s one of the greatest and darkest bits of comedy Shakespeare ever wrote. Presumably it was thought to interrupt the action, but then, that’s the point. This is a Macbeth committed Shakespeareans will feel compelled to see. It’s deliberate suggestion of cheapness tells its own story but we do need to find old-style BBC-type directors who know how to transfer stagework without making it sound declamatory and hammy.

That’s not something you would charge Powell and Pressburger with and it’s fascinating that Martin Scorcese has made a documentary celebrating the masters of Red Shoes, Peeping Tom and that wonderful film The Private Life of Colonel Blimp. The Powell Pressburger films are arguably some of the very greatest films ever made in Britain and it’s fascinating that Powell (who had been married to Pamela Brown, the original lead opposite John Gielgud in The Lady’s Not For Burning and a notable Shakespearean actress – there’s an audio recording of her Lady Macbeth to Alec Guiness’s Macbeth) should have married Scorcese’s editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. Colonel Blimp has the young Deborah Kerr together with Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook who is in Max Ophüls’s La Ronde.

There is also an opulent Netflix version of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full with Jeff Daniels masterful as the egregious Charlie Croker from Atlanta, Georgia and the wonderful Diane Lane as his ex-wife and the mother of his children. The script is by David E. Kelley – who can sometimes look a bit routine – but A Man in Full which opens with Shania Twain entertaining people at a party which is pure indulgence on Charlie’s part sets the tone. This is a version of Tom Wolfe’s exorbitant and over the top vision which is true to its source. Regina King’s direction has a compositional brilliance and its pure pizzazz is utterly grand. So if you want the memory of the book brought back to you in the most bravura way have a look at A Man in Full. It’s liable to have you hooked.