A Midsummer Night’s Dream: What fools these mortals still be

Shot over four days by Rodrigo Prieto (Frida), Julie Taymor's off-the-stage filmed production of A Midsummer Night's Dream has a phantasmagoric visual fluidity that emphasizes the play's uncanny unsettling nature more than its carnival silliness.

A sheet that carries Puck up to the heavens, which becomes a projection screen, sticks that serve as forest trees (black poles held by the actors) and black-clad actors who spin the white-dressed fairy children about to give them illusion of flying.

The real special effect here is Kathryn Hunter as Puck, portrayed as a bowler-clad vaudevillian, who delivers her raspy, sardonic lines while spinning in the air or dangling upside down from a wire. Her best scenes are opposite Oberon, King of the Fairies, powerfully played by English actor David Harewood (Homeland) in harem pants and bands of gold over his muscular frame. Their exchanges encapsulate the ambiguous dominant-submissive nature of all the relationships here.