My library was dukedom large enough

It is perhaps not possible for me to be sensible about Prospero's Books (1991), since I have dreamed of things like Prospero's library all my life—its antique books that do not exist on waking, that echoing architecture full of water and time—so I'll note mostly that it's one of the most beautiful films I've ever had inside my head and I do not understand why it took me nineteen years to see it. (Or why it doesn't exist on DVD. Seriously, Criterion, get your act together.) It is an adaptation of The Tempest, but it's not Shakespeare's; it is the play Prospero is writing in exile, the last and greatest piece of his magic that will free him from itself if he can pull it off, beginning so abstractly it might be impossible to identify the play if not for the names, ending with the bare stage's epilogue. Let your indulgence set me free. The longer the play goes on, the more real it becomes, the more like the Tempest we know, until finally the characters can speak in their own voices (no longer doubled or puppeted by Prospero) and the magician can break his staff, drown his books, and step offstage at last—or maybe, at last, step on, no longer stage-manager of the world around him (which is gotten entirely out of his twenty-four books) but a man who can live in it like anyone else. Story has written itself into history. I'd seen this in fiction before, but never on film. And it's dazzlingly, rich and strangely done. I love the physicality of its world, constantly in motion with the bodies of magic. I love its books, each of which is precisely what it needs to be, a wonder and a terror. I love that its Caliban is beautiful. You should all join me in persuading rushthatspeaks to write "The Ninety-Two Conceits of the Minotaur." Julie Taymor has a hell of a shadow to cross.