Does it work? That depends on whether you find Greenaway's elaborate visual conceits and rarified narrative structures daring and liberating, or boringly self-indulgent.
Comment
07/03/08
Prospero's Books (1991)
67 %
Reviews Counted: 24 Fresh: 16 Rotten:8 Average Rating: 5.9/10
Consensus:
There is no middle ground for viewers of Peter Greenaway's work, but for his fans, Prospero's Books is reliably daring.
Runtime: 2 hrs 6 mins
Synopsis: The story of the former Duke of Milan, Prospero, exiled with his daughter Miranda to a tiny island. There, with the help of mystical books brought with him in his flight, the magician Prospero summons incredible powers in vengeance against his enemies. Based on Shakespeare's last play, "The... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: John Gielgud, Michael Clark, Isabelle Pasco, Michel Blanc, Erland Josephson
Reviews
The product of a feverish, overflowing imagination, this almost impossibly dense take on The Tempest displays both the director's audacious brilliance and lewd extravagance at full tilt.
07/03/08
Top Critic
Lubricious biblophilia rubbing up against a warehouse of naked extras, this Shakespearean adaptation is, in many ways, the epitome of cinematic pretension.
07/03/08
Gone is any sense of drama or character; the cluttered spectacle yields no overriding design but simply disconnected MTV-like conceits or mini-ideas every three seconds.
07/03/08
It cries out to not only be heard but be seen for what it wishes to convey about the act of creativity.
08/29/07
To some degree, the relentless proliferation of ideas smothers the dramatic highs and lows, but this is a minor quibble compared to the sheer ambition and audacity of the overall conception.
02/09/06
Greenaway is not a frivolous film maker. He doesn't shoot a lot of material with the expectation of stumbling upon a found object within. His films are planned from the first frame to the last.
05/20/03
Top Critic
Gielgud's voice has the ability to put you right to sleep with its bass and monotone timbre. The good news is that when you wake up, you won't have missed a thing.
10/27/02
There's nothing quite like it in all of cinema -- and that's either a very good thing, or a very perplexing one, depending on how you feel about Greenaway's work.
07/30/02
Greenaway bombards you with images, with no regard for the average attention span. Is he a genius or a fake? Debating that question is almost as stimulating as watching a Greenaway film.
05/12/01
Because Greenaway is working familiar Shakespearean territory, he and cohort Sacha Vierny run wild with the visuals, embedding frames within frames, composing each shot like an independent work of art.
01/01/00
Prospero's Books references the masterpieces of the past in a manner that antagonizes our pleasure in the arts rather than enhancing it.
01/01/00
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