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Reviews
Anne Boleyn (2021)
Wonderful!
The Boleyn family was cast out from society, vilified, and persecuted for being who they were. What better way to convey this in a modern movie than the casting of the family with black actors?
The performances are outstanding. The earthiness and the sense of how cold and how dangerous it must have been to live in a cold castle with people who hate you is palpable.
Shakespeare did not write accurate history. Philippa Gregory writes fiction, not history. Any work of art, be it a novel, a movie, a play or indeed 'history' itself is all interpretation. I thought this series was wonderful in the way that at last we saw a fresh, lively and naturalistic interpretation of a period of history that has so often been trotted out as either dull, dry academic boredom or salacious Carry On nonsense.
Great Expectations (2023)
A great retelling.
Visceral, well acted, wonderfully evocative locations and sets.
I've read the novel a few times, and seen some dreary retellings which take as many liberties with the original. This is dynamic and zingy and hugely enjoyable interpretation. Any movie or tv series based on a literary work is, by definition, an interpretation. This production is no different from any other in that sense. Dickens didn't write history, he wrote fiction which was populist and meant to be shocking and entertaining and he had plenty of critics in his time who didn't like what he wrote. In that sense, this production is very much what Dickens would have wanted. It's great!