Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

"The way Elizabeth: The Golden Age tells it, the Spanish Armada's defeat by the British Empire was the orgasm The Virgin Queen never had." That would be Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

"[Shekhar] Kapur's sweeping spectacle forgoes all musty pretensions of middle-brow edutainment, and if you expected a history lesson you'll emerge from the theater deaf and dumb. Elizabeth: The Golden Age is the work of a director who is intoxicated with the power of cinema, and as an aficionado of Revenge of the Sith, I felt right at home in his world," writes Jürgen Fauth.

Updated through 10/12.

It's "an unholy mixture of the banal and the bombastic," writes writes David Edelstein in New York. "[Cate] Blanchett drops her voice, stiffens her cheekbones, sends out daggers with her eyes, and rises above the mess—locked in her own battle with Bette Davis, Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren, and the armada of other Elizabeths that keep her on guard."

"The original was no less a fanciful soap opera - Dynasty in Renaissance Faire drag, Dallas with a fancier Southfork Ranch," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice. "But the sequel is considerably more garish and voluble. If Elizabeth was BBC stuff writ large, a history lesson made enchanting for soap fans, its successor is more like an Indian import: How is it these people don't break into song or skip into a dance routine every five minutes, honestly?"

"Personally, I'd rather watch Blackadder, but The Golden Age packs some kind of laughs with its music-video bombast and back-after-a-commercial break score," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine.

"[T]he sequel's excesses are so hyper-exaggerated as to disconcert even the most ardent fan of the original," finds Brandon Fibbs at cinemaattraction.

Paul Fischer profiles Blanchett for the Scotsman. Via Movie City News.

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

Update: "Elizabeth: The Golden Age really only works as a showcase for one acclaimed actress to wow the audience," writes Nathaniel R at Zoom In Online. "And wow she does."

Update, 10/11: Kapur's "made a completely useless, over-enunciated film - an instant antique," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

Updates, 10/12: "The blurring of fact and fancy is, of course, routine with this kind of opulent big-screen production, in which the finer points of history largely take a back seat to personal melodrama and lavish details of production design and costumes," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "In this regard The Golden Age may set a standard for such an adulterated form: it's reductive, distorted and deliriously far-fetched, but the gowns are fabulous, the wigs are a sight and Clive Owen makes a dandy Errol Flynn, even if he's really meant to be Walter Raleigh, the queen's favorite smoldering slab of man meat."

"Protestants rule, Catholics drool in this absurdly overheated dish of anglophilia by a director whose very name indicates that he might know better," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler.

"It's about 30 years later, and she's hardly aged a day. How does she do it?" asks Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "By sheer force of fantasy, apparently - the same force that has led director Shekhar Kapur to give us Queen Elizabeth as a cross between Joan of Arc and Joan Crawford, Sir Walter Raleigh as a bodice-ripping pirate sprung from the cover of a supermarket romance novel, King Philip II of Spain as a mincing lulu with a bizarre politico-erotic fixation on the virgin ('Whore!') queen, and the battle against the Spanish Armada as a series of chopped-together outtakes from Pirates of the Caribbean."

"[I]t is an overwrought mess, equally unpersuasive as history and as melodrama," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "Him: 'Why be afraid of tomorrow, when today is all we have?' Her: 'In another world and at another time, could you have loved me?' Perhaps in another movie."

"Kapur, once again, has taken a story with plenty of juice and bled it into something pale and limp," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

"The question is not whether it's okay to rewrite history in a big-budget entertainment," writes Bilge Ebiri at Nerve. "It's just how stupid you think your audience is. And not even Gary Oldman could help with that one."

"The events beg for Shakespearean gravity, but the only tragedy here is that so little could be made of so much," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

Alonso Duralde's parenthetical remark at MSNBC is definitely worth noting: "Incidentally, here's hoping the distributors of Elizabeth: TGA aren't expecting to be a hit in Spain. The film depicts everyone on the Iberian peninsula as a black-clad, wild-eyed Catholic fanatic."

"Tracking shots, twisting boom shots, placements that are either radically high or low — they all betoken a director who doesn't trust his material," writes Richard Schickel in Time.

Gill Pringle talks with Geoffrey Rush for the Independent.

Posted by dwhudson at October 10, 2007 7:19 AM