Veteran stage and screen actor John Gielgud, considered one of the finest verse speakers in the English language, plays the lead role in Peter Greenaway’s dense and visually ravishing take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, lending his remarkable voice to nearly all the characters. (Gielgud was eighty-seven at the time.) The film structures its motifs around the twenty-four books Prospero took into exile—brought to life as remarkable videographic tomes on water, cosmology, pornography, ruins, music, and other subjects. It is this panoply of arcane knowledge that the Duke employs, along with his magical powers, to exact his revenge.