Elizabeth: The Golden Age

New York Post Lou Lumenick

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

An enticingly risque saga of the 16th century monarch.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Cate Blanchett returns to the role that made her a star, and though this sequel to "Elizabeth" (1998) is less defensible as history, as florid costume drama it's just as entertaining.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Blanchett commands the screen as she commands the royal navy. Her unforced majesty makes a so-so film worth watching.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Weighed down by its splendor. There are scenes where the costumes are so sumptuous, the sets so vast, the music so insistent, that we lose sight of the humans behind the dazzle of the production.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Elizabeth: The Golden Age lacks the intricate plotting that characterized its predecessor. The screenplay is more action-oriented but not as smart, and some of the dialogue is downright cheesy.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Historians might demand a little more history from Elizabeth: The Golden Age. But soap opera loyalists could hardly ask for more soap.

Empire Will Lawrence

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.

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

It says a lot about this movie that the most arresting character in it is Mary, whom Morton unsurprisingly endows with a fanatical combination of narcissism and rage.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Too bad Kapur's new, glittering sequel also shows up feeling prematurely old, square, and cautious. A production of exquisitely complicated wigs and expensively grand wide shots, it pauses often to admire its own beauty, leery of messing with previous success.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Favors pageantry over substance.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Ms. Blanchett can do no wrong, and does none here, though the movie around her, a popcorn-worthy sequel to the 1998 "Elizabeth," often lapses into opacity or grandiosity.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

History gets short shrift from screenwriters William Nicholson and Michael Hirst -- starting with the not insignificant fact that in 1585, Elizabeth was 52 years old – but Kapur is clearly more interested in spectacle and soap opera than dusty old facts.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Squanders the opportunity to give us a telling glimpse of the woman behind the ruff. Instead, the costume drama is all gilt and opulence.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

It is a silly film about serious matters.

Slate Dana Stevens

If you go in fully prepared for the cinematic equivalent of a grocery-store novel, this unnecessary sequel to "Elizabeth" (1998) has its pleasures.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

It’s intentionally playful and an inadvertent giggle, an overripe melodrama that’s by turns a bodice-ripper, a cloak-and-dagger thriller and a serious-minded historical drama with dubious contemporary overtones.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Despite good performances all around, particularly the ever-brilliant Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a gilded ornament, speculative and uninterested in much besides this queen's matters of heart.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Cate Blanchett can do anything, even play Bob Dylan, but she can't save this creaky sequel to her star-making 1998 biopic of Elizabeth I.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

This handsomely mounted film, in its cute ADD way, soon forgets its half-hearted attempt to make History Relevant to What Is Going On in the World Today and morphs into a sort of Classic Comics on acid, or, as a friend so brilliantly put it, "the longest Eurythmics video ever made."

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

It's common in Hollywood to describe a disappointing film this way: "Well, it certainly looks great!"

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

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.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

A shrill and silly affair, bordering at times on camp.

Time Richard Schickel

It's a faux epic -- swell costumes, historically authentic settings, a certain amount of bustle and skulking, but very little dramatically gripping activity.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

Despite its title, Shekhar Kapur's new film resembles tarnished copper, its dull focus more appropriate for an episode of “One Tree Hill” than a biopic of one of Britain's greatest monarchs.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The best you can say about Owen is that no actor has looked better in thigh-high boots and puffed-out britches.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Blanchett miraculously gives a good performance, even when saddled with lines like this one, to Clive Owen's Sir Walter Raleigh: "In another world, could you have loved me?"

Variety Todd McCarthy

Without the pleasure of watching Cate Blanchett continue the role that launched her to stardom, there would be little to recommend this latest of many cinematic and television accounts of the celebrated monarch's life.

Village Voice Robert Wilonsky

Kapur and his screenwriter have little interest here in maintaining even a dollop of historical accuracy.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

An unholy mixture of the banal and the bombastic.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Might have been a lavish, silly entertainment. In places it comes close, but no sheaf of tobacco.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

The original “Elizabeth” was visually lush and quite engaging, but this is a sprawling mess.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

Gives new meaning to "costume drama" in that it is a drama primarily about costumes. But the drama is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the temple.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

So instead of history and drama, we get images, many of them striking but none of them memorable, and noise that deafens until no sense can escape. The events beg for Shakespearean gravity, but the only tragedy here is that so little could be made of so much.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Overdresses and ultimately abandons what drew us to its 1998 predecessor in the first place: an intimate embrace with history.