RECOMMENDED Movies that swoop and swoon with stylistic abandon are usually dismissed as “glossy” or “pretentious” or “all style and no substance” by reviewers, and while there is an emotional chilliness to the hard-charging tableaux of Shekar Kapur’s “Elizabeth: The Golden Years,” the follow-up is not that distant from the things that made “Elizabeth” such a grandiloquent eyeful. Movies, however much some might hope, are a panoply of artfully arrayed images and sounds, and whomever’s searching for the perfect movie script ought to lie down for sleep and dream it before dawn. That’s not to say that “Elizabeth: The Golden Years” is anything approaching greatness: it’s just foolish to expect a filmmaker from another culture, whose work is steeped in Indian design conceits and philosophical concerns, even his misguided “Four Feathers” (2002), to be providing the sort of schematic approach to historical material that satisfies the most literal eye. If I wanted a recitation of factual material, I’d read a book. Craig Armstrong and A. R. Rahman’s score is emphatic; Remi Adefarasin’s cinematography gleams and blushes. With the ever-regal Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Samantha Morton, Clive Owen, Rhys Ifans and the golden Abbie Cornish. 114m. (Ray Pride)
Related Stories
Boogie Golden Hours: A Review of Licorice Pizza Paul Thomas Anderson's "Licorice Pizza" is a delicious, incident-filled but quietly complex vision of coming of age in the year 1973 in his well-traveled precincts of Encino.
Heart: A Review of Soul The real world is soulful, too, in Pixar's bountiful life of the mind.
Seeing The Elephant: A Review Of Babylon The boisterous, brawling yet melancholy "Babylon," is a variation on film history, but more drawing for drama. It's gaudy and mean, celebratory and sorrowful.
