Cate is a wondrous actress but she is scandalously ill served here, and not just by the facile nature of the dialogue... It's as if the director has a checklist of the characteristics he wishes her to display and she should just get on with it.

| Aug 23, 2018

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

But saddled with this dopey script, [Blanchett] is stuck pulling a series of poses and wearing one ornate gown after another.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 1, 2008

A pedigreed romance, an excuse for Blanchett to bind herself in satin and channel Kate Hepburn.

| Original Score: B | Feb 21, 2008

If this is a film that irritates nearly as much as it pleases, we do get a sense of the times, and of the lady in question. The eyes, if not the brain, are certainly given a workout that they will remember.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 2, 2007

See it anyway for Blanchett's soulful modulation between queenly command and womanly anguish.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 2, 2007

The pity of this botched follow-up is that it never once touches us.

| Nov 2, 2007

For all the shortcomings of its clunky, stubbornly anachronistic dialogue, the first instalment of the Elizabeth saga packed a real punch.

| Nov 2, 2007

Where Kapur's first Elizabeth was cool, cerebral, fascinatingly concerned with complex plotting, the new movie is pitched at the level of a Jean Plaidy romantic novel.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Nov 2, 2007

Kapur's film is visually arresting, each frame a work of art in miniature. But there is something rather breathless about the storytelling.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 2, 2007

Making soap of statecraft, the film has plenty of juicy moments, but offers an inconsistent rather than complex view of Elizabeth.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/6 | Nov 1, 2007

Over-indulgent and melodramatic, as is the nature of artistic mythmaking, The Golden Age will beguile and repel in equal measure. The performances are supreme, although some viewers may struggle to reconcile the director's epic intentions.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 1, 2007

Even though the script plays fast and loose with historical facts, that indomitable bulldog spirit rings true and holds you captive for the duration.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 30, 2007

This is romantic fantasy, not history, and much of the time you fully expect Kapur, here making his third post-Bollywood feature, to turn his cast loose in song and dance.

| Oct 19, 2007

Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth: The Golden Age, from a screenplay by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst, turned out to be more rousingly entertaining than many of its less-than-lukewarm reviews had led me to anticipate.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2007

I can almost recommend this film as a great-looking, bombastic guilty pleasure. But the soundtrack is unbearable, the soap opera love triangle -- laughable.

Full Review | Oct 15, 2007

From its extravagant costumes to its pompous score, The Golden Age is packed with distractions. But the biggest of all is the story itself, which works so mightily to tarnish the queen at its core.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 12, 2007

Expect a fast-paced, beautifully mounted and well-acted soap opera with overripe dialogue that plays fast and loose with history -- just like they did in the '30s, '40s and '50s -- and you won't come away disappointed.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 12, 2007

The events beg for Shakespearean gravity, but the only tragedy here is that so little could be made of so much.

Full Review | Original Score: D+ | Oct 12, 2007

The danger in making a costume drama is that all of it will be as lifeless as wax figures. Kapur escapes this fate by relying on sex and a luminous star capable of being at once regal and alluring.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 12, 2007