- 7
...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.
—Lou Lumenick New York Post
- 6
...weighed down by its splendor.
—Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times
- 6
Love triangles! Childish rages! High fashion! Is this a page ripped from a teenager's diary, or a day in the life of a Hollywood starlet, perhaps? Nope, it's Shekhar Kapur's histrionic follow-up to the ravishing Elizabeth. And this lady hasn't gotten better with age.
—Dezhda Mountz E!
- 6
...has sweep and momentum and almost as many mood shifts and genre notes as the queen has dresses. 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.
—Manohla Dargis New York Times
- 6
...bold, Eastern-influenced...
—Lisa Schwarzbaum Entertainment Weekly
- 5
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.
—Peter Travers Rolling Stone
- 5
...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.
—Carina Chocano Los Angeles Times
- 5
Of the more than 15 sequels already released this year, Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth: The Golden Age is by no means the most unnecessary...
—Sean O'Connell filmcritic.com
- 5
...a handsomely mounted film...
—Glenn Kenny Premiere
- 5
...a silly film about serious matters...
—Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune
- 5
...gorgeous, melodramatic...
—Maitland McDonagh TV Guide
- 4
This one is squarely aimed at the kind of crowd who loves seeing big, blustering epics where monarchs dress in what looks like opulently appointed outdoor tents and ferociously shout lines like, "I have a hurricane in me that will strip Spain bare if you dare to try me!" No problem, we believe you.
—Pete Hammond Maxim
- 4
In spite of everything, 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?"
—Peter Rainer Christian Science Monitor
- 4
The events beg for Shakespearean gravity, but the only tragedy here is that so little could be made of so much.
—Keith Phipps Onion AV Club
- 4
...how is it these people don?t break into song or skip into a dance routine every five minutes, honestly?
—Robert Wilonsky LA Weekly
- 4
...a dreary sequel...
—Leah Rozen People
- 4
...a royal mess -- an overheated yet curiously remote melodrama as ersatz as those glossy, romanticized costume pageants MGM cranked out in the 1930s and 1940s.
—Tim Knight Reel
- 4
...grim and dingy...
—Robert Wilonsky Village Voice
- 4
...Kapur cannot ignore that Elizabeth was a mother to no one, but he subscribes to the belief that the woman never so much as stuck a finger inside her own vagina, which is probably why every scene in this bombastic, singularly unpleasant freak show insinuates that the queen experienced sex vicariously through elaborate quips, fancy clothes, and keeping her bitches on short leashes.
—Ed Gonzalez Slant Magazine