A Masterpiece with an incredible cast, performances and images that will stay in your mind. Yes, there's mid-life crisis, and yes, there's teen-age angst. It's really about growing up at various ages or stages in life. But wait, before dismissing the film as yet another "growing pains" movie, do give it a try. It's been my favorite for many years and everyone to whom I've shown it became a fan. It's the combination of story, actors well-chosen and directed, environment, atmosphere, cinematography, and sound track, that just works in perfect harmony. It's a movie that has you enthralled from the beginning and that doesn't lose its power even after many viewings. It definitely has more than its share of beautifully orchestrated comedic moments as well. One of the rare ones that has it all.

"Tempest," derived very loosely from Shakespeare's play, is an interesting concept fatally marred by its length. If a ruthless film editor had been employed to cut the final print, this might have been a really good film. It certainly has the right cast: John Cassavetes, Gena Rowland, Susan Sarandon, Molly Ringwald and Raul Julia. Cassavetes, an excellent actor who largely avoided the mainstream, is the "Prospero" of this film, a "world-famous" architect with magical powers, while Raul Julia is Caliban, recreated as Kalibanous, the lone inhabitant of a Greek Island to which the architect retreats along with his daughter (Molly Ringwald) and his young lover (Susan Sarandon), leaving behind his estranged wife (Gena Rowlands). Each of the five performs extremely well, but there are a host of peripheral characters who should have been left on the cutting room floor and many inessential scenes that should have been dispensed with altogether. Unfortunately, Paul Mazursky, the producer, director and co-author of the script indulged himself and was apparently unable to separate the necessary from the surplus. Still, there are the pleasures of this film: the young Susan Sarandon at her sexiest, Molly Ringwald, not yet famous, Raul Julia, an antic, horny Caliban, and Gena Rowlands and Cassavetes at the peak of their talents. Without those pleasures, I would have given this film a much lower rating.

Just lovely. It is long. No climax. Don't wait for anything to happen. Great for a rainy day. About a man in a mid life crisis who takes his family to a secluded area of the Greek isles. I saw this in my teens and still love it 20+ years later. I have been unable to find it in video stores however. Molly Ringwald is a cute average teenager who basically wants to go home and then kind of settles into the place. There are no phones, no TV, boredom, which when hit with quietness like that, the human condition is to be bored and then to reflect. And each character does so. Susan Sarandon plays a beautiful woman who wants to be sexually involved with John Cassavetes' character, but he is unable to, well, you know. Gina Rowlands, is the wife that loves him but is just about to give up on their marriage. He is demanding and frustrating to everyone. There is another character in the movie, a Greek who talks to Molly Ringwald inappropriately about sex, but things that she is curious about. But he is irritating and horny and i didn't like this character. The locale of the film is what makes this film so so good. It wouldn't work if filmed anywhere else. I recommend this film and give it a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10.

"Tempest" is a somewhat self-indulgent, uneven, discursive movie. But as Lord Byron, another visitor to Greece, protested to his friend John Murray about his similarly self-indulgent and discursive "Don Juan," "It may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing?"The connections to Shakespeare's "Tempest" may seem, as another commentator here claims, a bit tenuous. But watch the film again after re-reading "The Tempest," and they'll seem far closer. What makes this film flawed is its uneasy mixture of straightforward normal narrative and sudden jarring apparent improvisation, particularly between Cassavetes and Rowland. But to be honest, these scenes are the most remarkable and gripping in the film, if the hardest to watch.The music of this film, composed by Stomu Yamashta, is also overlooked. Particularly fine is the perfect little piece played to accompany the afternoon siesta, as people, animals, and seemingly the entire island collapse to sleep away the hottest part of the afternoon. It's a sublime moment, and representative of the best aspect of this movie and the one thing that keeps it somewhat unified, the fact that (aside from extensive flashbacks and the very end) it is the story of one day on an island, from awakening to night. Overall, I'd rather watch this film a hundred times than see some bombastic Hollywood piece of crap once. And in fact, I probably have watched it several dozen times. Most times, I see something I missed before.(Confession: I'm biased. This was the second movie I took my Greek-American goddess wife to see.)Trivia notes on this flick: It was Molly Ringwald's first movie, as well as Sam Robards';It was actually not filmed on an island, but in Gytheion, the southern tip of the remote Mani peninsula of the Peloponnesus of Greece;The (by today's standards) primitive special effects were done by Bran Ferren, who later became head of Disney Imagineering, and still later was an adviser to the US intelligence community;Paul Mazursky, the director, chose the title of his recent autobiography, "Show Me the Magic," from the script of "Tempest."