ELIZABETH (65)

Directed by: Shekhar Kapur

Starring: Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Christopher Eccleston

The Pitch: The rise to power of Queen Elizabeth I, from flirtatious young girl to omnipotent Virgin Queen.

Theo Sez: Talk of Bollywood and LA REINE MARGOT is fair enough - but this is actually THE GODFATHER in fancy dress, culminating in a mass wipe-out of enemies cross-cut with our heroine quietly taking on the lineaments of power, and making of that heroine a reluctant, not-yet-hardened outsider forced into the family business, able to succeed only by destroying some essential part of herself. That this turns out to be her femininity - leaving her a dried-up, sexless Virgin Queen - seems unnecessarily melodramatic (especially since we've previously seen her bending the rules to her advantage, using feminine charm for political ends), but then it's a bold-strokes kind of movie, firelight-orange skin tones amid blue-grey medieval gloom, evil Queen Mary a venomous hag squired by a midget-in-waiting. Emphasis is on the savage and grotesque, possibly as a comment on 16th-century religious fundamentalism - a time of heretic-burning and Papal fatwas - maybe even as a metaphor for the sexual exploitation Elizabeth must rise above (at least if you buy the ending as a kind of radical-feminist apotheosis, declaring her independence from the world of men), but most likely just for their visual dazzle and gross-out value, hence the REINE MARGOT factor, following in the hellish-historical tradition of THE DEVILS and THE CONQUEROR WORM. It's not, in the end, particularly deep, but it looks tremendous, the palace intrigues are (yes) intriguing, and some of it - like the gradual pull-back from a river running blood to a wide-shot of its banks strewn with corpses - edges beyond spectacular to unforgettable. Not, pace AMPAS, one of the year's best pictures, or anywhere near ; good pungent fun nonetheless.