Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
IMDB #242 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061184/]

The Gist:
Ah, the transposed play into film, with all its dialogue and theatrics and secrets. That's the way really good older plays work after all, you revolve the entire play around a secret that your probing dialogue plays with without revealing until the end, creating conflict through deflections, creating depth. It's a whole style, honestly, and pretty much all of the classic American plays do this. Virginia Woolf, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Death of a Salesmen, and even Streetcar to a certain extent. Anyway, Virginia Woolf was peculiar because for a great part of the film I found Elizabeth Taylor's performance a bit overacted. I instead latched on to Burton's performance and the brilliantly contentious dialogue. Richard Burton killed this thing in every scene he was in, and by the end of the film when Taylor had to show some vulnerability I began to warm to her performance too. I love how the story not only reveals the nature of their son but also the nature of the relationship and how all this infighting is a carefully balanced "game". All those third act revelations and their ramifications on the institution of marriage lifts the film from an enjoyable bitter exchange of banter into something poignant.