Tempest

Just what we need, another Mazursky film where bright women wear the whitest of knickers, and where New Yorkers hide insecurities of seismic scale beneath that wonderfully direct way they have of talking at each other. Shakespeare's story is just another Manhattan mid-life crisis, and frankly, who cares? Mr Success (Cassavetes) ditches everything for a simple life in remotest Greece with his daughter Miranda. Yet Cassavetes, sporting the fanciest haircut since Frederic Forrest in Hammett, performs with such crusty conviction that one does start to care about what happens. That old Shakespearean magic survives even this loosest of adaptations, and by the end one is wallowing in the length and indulgence of it all (thinking as much about a summer holiday as about the film). Only later does one realise with the greatest relief what has been missing all along from the picture: Woody Allen.