Dispensing with tableau compositions, this adaptation feels liberated from static theatrical and, to a lesser degree, cinematic convention by the overall openness of its staging and camerawork that's somewhere between handheld and Steadicam.

| Jun 28, 2013

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 22, 2013

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 22, 2013

The film has plenty of detractors who see Taymor's approach as strained and overwrought, but Mirren finds some grace notes that no Prospero could ever have sounded.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 20, 2011

The special effects are intrusive and anything but magical and the text is rather curiously edited. But it's worth seeing for Mirren.

| Mar 7, 2011

Lost for a***holes.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 5, 2011

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 5, 2011

Mirren is a powerful presence: maybe gender-bending Shakespeare is the only way to give Mirren the movie roles she deserves.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 4, 2011

An inspired, but sometimes irksome take on 400 year old material.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 3, 2011

"I can do real rocks and seas," cries cinema. To which the right response is: "We don't want real rocks and seas. We want the ones in our head, put there by Shakespeare."

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 2, 2011

You expect Nicolas Cage to pop up from behind a sand dune on a Harley brandishing a rocket launcher.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 2, 2011

Taymor, by turning Prospero into a woman while retaining an "imperialist" view of Caliban, will no doubt simultaneously please and enrage left-wing critics. The rest of us can enjoy the movie's strengths...

Full Review | Dec 27, 2010

Primarily an exercise in eccentric (and, I would argue, empty) spectacle.

| Dec 17, 2010

Normally I'd watch Helen Mirren in anything, even if she was just putting out the laundry or reading the phone book. But, given the roteness of her line readings here, it might have been better if the phone book rather than Shakespeare was her text.

| Original Score: C- | Dec 17, 2010

The costumes designed by Sandy Powell - leather gowns and military uniforms, Renaissance in silhouette and detailed with zippers - are the film's most arresting element.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 17, 2010

Most plays-turned-movies try to open things up. Taymor still thinks like a theater director, ending up with a "Tempest" that takes place in a teapot.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 17, 2010

A pretty frustrating adaptation of Shakespeare's play, one that dog-paddles around in ever-more-frenetic circles, searching for a way inside the material.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 16, 2010

Julie Taymor's The Tempest adapts Shakespeare to the screen with boldness and imagination. Bard buffs are likely to love it, despite the liberties it takes.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 16, 2010

A movie that veers from ethereal beauty (its closing credit sequence, as a book of magic softly drowns in a dark sea, is a stunner) to mystifying cheesiness.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 16, 2010

The best sequences in "Tempest'' are all quiet, not that there are many of them.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 16, 2010