The article focuses on the priorities in contemporary studies of cinematic adaptations. Looking at the various appropriations of this Shakespeare’s tragedy in art and indie movies, the researcher reveals how by underscoring the director’s visual imagination and the ‘power’ of a cinematic tradition one can revise the scope of adaptation studies. Concentrating on the signature elements of A. Kaurismäki’s and M. Almereyda’s cinematography, the author emphasizes the productivity of the audience’s ‘entrancement’ with the visual and sonic interpretation of the classical piece (through the use of the American film noir stylistics by Kaurismäki, and through Almereyda’s interplay of multiple on-screen realities). In the viewers’ memory, literary meanings are expelled rather aggressively by new cinematographic ones. Kaurismäki turns the tragedy into a tastefully stylized noir whodunit, while Almereyda went for a reflective narrative about neo-Hamletism at an age of expanding virtual realities. In her demonstration of how the directors achieved such effects, the author argues the priority of the cinematographic auteurship (including the case of collective auteurship) in the analysis of contemporary film adaptations.