Tempest (Blu-ray)

"...dazzling.  Shawn Levy, Portland Oregonian
"Mirren is a powerful presence...  Peter Bradshaw, Guardian [UK]

Editor's Note Across the Universe's Julie Taymor shakes up Shakespeare with her adaptation of THE TEMPEST, retrofitting the fantastical tale with a female lead, casting Academy Award-winning actress Helen Mirren in what is usually the male role of Prospero. The storyline follows the newly coined Prospera (Mirren), an exiled magician who uses her powers to call upon a tempest to bring her enemies to the island she's been forced to call home, not knowing that it will bring a suitor to her daughter, Miranda (Felicity Jones). The Miramax/Touchstone release also stars David Strathairn, Djimon Hounsou, Russell Brand, Alfred Molina, and Ben Wishaw.

	Jeremy Irons
	Alfred Molina
	Djimon Hounsou
	Felicity Jones
	Russell Brand
	Ben Whishaw
	Helen Mirren
	Tom Conti
	David Strathairn
	Reeve Carney
	Alan Cumming
	Julie Taymor - Screenwriter
	Julia Taylor-Stanley - Producer
	Bob Chartoff - Producer
	Lynn Hendee - Producer
	William Shakespeare - Source Writer
	Julie Taymor - Director

New York Times
"[The actors] speak the language beautifully, finding nuances of humor, feeling and fantasy packed into the prose and poetry of the script." 12/09/2010

Chicago Sun-Times
"Here Prospero becomes Prospera and is magnificently played by Helen Mirren with more ferocity than resignation." 12/15/2010

A.V. Club
"[Mirren is] a remarkable actress and makes for a fine Prospera, at once flinty and determined but with a pulsing parental tenderness she makes evident in lines that lesser actors might throw away." 12/09/2010

Movieline
"[Wishaw] has a command of the language that, along with Mirren, sets the film along its proper axis." 12/10/2010

Total Film
3 stars out of 5 -- "Mirren, striding around like an ageing Glastonbury hipster, leads from the front, while Felicity Jones is an appealing presence as her lovestruck daughter Miranda." 04/01/2011

New Yorker 7 of 10
In Julie Taymor's adaptation of Shakespeare's final play, Prospero, the deposed duke of Milan, has become the deposed duchess Prospera (Helen Mirren), whose bitter exile on a barren island is made more bitter still by the knowledge that the relatives and friends who robbed her of her station resented her intellectual and necromantic powers as a female. Mirren has the range and power to play a woman with unprecedented control of the elements, and over men, too. Prospera has two minions at her disposal?the sylph Ariel (Ben Whishaw), a translucent pale hermaphrodite who digitally skitters through the air, and the very earthbound and lustful slave Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), an African man covered with mud. 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, including the dramatic blackened turf, the solid acting of David Strathairn and Tom Conti as two of the scheming Italians brought into Prospera's web by the storm that she summons forth, and the shenanigans of Russell Brand and Alfred Molina as Trinculo and Stephano, Shakespeare's inevitable buffoons. - David Denby